Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [130]
“What are you grinning at?” she said.
“I’m sorry. I had not in fact planned to make my entrance in this way. I didn’t mean to alarm you. But you should have seen your face when you opened the door. It was priceless.”
Silence. To her surprise, Salander found his uninvited intrusion acceptable—well, at least not unpleasant.
“You’ll have to think of it as my revenge for your poking around in my personal life,” he said. “Are you frightened?”
“Not the least bit,” Salander said.
“Good. I’m not here to make trouble for you.”
“If you even try to hurt me I’ll have to do you an injury. You’ll be sorry.”
Blomkvist studied her. She was barely four foot eleven and did not look as though she could put up much resistance if he were an assailant who had forced his way into her apartment. But her eyes were expressionless and calm.
“Well, that won’t be necessary,” he said at last. “I only need to talk to you. If you want me to leave, all you have to do is say so. It’s funny but…oh, nothing…”
“What?”
“This may sound crazy, but four days ago I didn’t even know you existed. Then I read your analysis of me.” He searched through his shoulder bag and brought out the report. “It was not entertaining reading.”
He looked out of the kitchen window for a while. “Could I bum a cigarette?” She slid the pack across the table.
“You said before that we don’t know each other, and I said that yes, we do.” He pointed at the report. “I can’t compete with you. I’ve only done a rapid routine check, to get your address and date of birth, stuff like that. But you certainly know a great deal about me. Much of which is private, dammit, things that only my closest friends know. And now here I am, sitting in your kitchen and eating bagels with you. We have known each other half an hour, but I have the feeling that we’ve been friends for years. Does that make sense to you?”
She nodded.
“You have beautiful eyes,” he said.
“You have nice eyes yourself,” she said.
Long silence.
“Why are you here?” she said.
Kalle Blomkvist—she remembered his nickname and suppressed the impulse to say it out loud—suddenly looked serious. He also looked very tired. The self-confidence that he had shown when he first walked into her apartment was now gone. The clowning was over, or at least had been put aside. She felt him studying her closely.
Salander felt that her composure was barely skin-deep and that she really wasn’t in complete control of her nerves. This totally unlooked-for visit had shaken her in a way that she had never experienced in connection with her work. Her bread and butter was spying on people. In fact she had never thought of what she did for Armansky as a real job; she thought of it more as a complicated pastime, a sort of hobby.
The truth was that she enjoyed digging into the lives of other people and exposing the secrets they were trying to hide. She had been doing it, in one form or another, for as long as she could remember. And she was still doing it today, not only when Armansky gave her an assignment, but sometimes for the sheer fun of it. It gave her a kick. It was like a complicated computer game, except that it dealt with real live people. And now one of her hobbies was sitting right here in her kitchen, feeding her bagels. It was totally absurd.
“I have a fascinating problem,” Blomkvist said. “Tell me this, when you were doing your research on me for Herr Frode, did you have any idea what it was going to be used for?”
“No.”
“The purpose was to find out all that information about me because Frode, or rather his employer, wanted to give me a freelance job.”
“I see.”
He gave her a faint smile.
“One of these days you and I should have a discussion about the ethics of snooping into other people’s lives. But right now I have a different problem. The job I was offered, and which inexplicably I agreed to do, is without doubt the most bizarre assignment