Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [135]
Not only that, he had teased her.
Under normal circumstances that sort of behaviour would have made her mentally cock a pistol. But she had not felt an iota of threat or any sort of hostility from his side. He had good reason to read her the riot act, even report her to the police. Instead he had treated even her hacking into his computer as a joke.
That had been the most sensitive part of their conversation. Blomkvist seemed to be deliberately not broaching the subject, and finally she could not help asking the question.
“You said that you knew what I did.”
“You’ve been inside my computer. You’re a hacker.”
“How do you know that?” Salander was absolutely positive that she had left no traces and that her trespassing could not be discovered by anyone unless a top security consultant sat down and scanned the hard drive at the same time as she was accessing the computer.
“You made a mistake.”
She had quoted from a text that was only on his computer.
Salander sat in silence. Finally she looked up at him, her eyes expressionless.
“How did you do it?” he asked.
“My secret. What are you thinking of doing about it?”
Mikael shrugged.
“What can I do?”
“It’s exactly what you do as a journalist.”
“Of course. And that’s why we journalists have an ethics committee that keeps track of the moral issues. When I write an article about some bastard in the banking industry, I leave out, for instance, his or her private life. I don’t say that a forger is a lesbian or gets turned on by having sex with her dog or anything like that, even if it happens to be true. Bastards too have a right to their private lives. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“So you encroached on my integrity. My employer doesn’t need to know who I have sex with. That’s my business.”
Salander’s face was creased by a crooked smile.
“You think I shouldn’t have mentioned that?”
“In my case it didn’t make a lot of difference. Half the city knows about my relationship with Erika. But it’s a matter of principle.”
“In that case, it might amuse you to know that I also have principles comparable to your ethics committee’s. I call them Salander’s Principles. One of them is that a bastard is always a bastard, and if I can hurt a bastard by digging up shit about him, then he deserves it.”
“OK,” Blomkvist said. “My reasoning isn’t too different from yours, but…”
“But the thing is that when I do a PI, I also look at what I think about the person. I’m not neutral. If the person seems like a good sort, I might tone down my report.”
“Really?”
“In your case I toned it down. I could have written a book about your sex life. I could have mentioned to Frode that Erika Berger has a past in Club Xtreme and played around with BDSM in the eighties—which would have prompted certain unavoidable notions about your sex life and hers.”
Blomkvist met Salander’s gaze. After a moment he laughed.
“You’re really meticulous, aren’t you? Why didn’t you put it in the report?”
“You are adults who obviously like each other. What you do in bed is nobody’s business, and the only thing I would have achieved by talking about her was to hurt both of you, or to provide someone with blackmail material. I don’t know Frode—the information could have ended up with Wennerström.”
“And you don’t want to provide Wennerström with information?”
“If I had to choose between you and him, I’d probably end up in your court.”
“Erika and I have a…our relationship is…”
“Please, I really don’t give a toss about what sort of relationship you have. But you haven’t answered my question: what do you plan to do about my hacking into your computer?”
“Lisbeth, I’m not here to blackmail you. I’m here to ask you to help me do some research. You can say yes or no. If you say no, fine, I’ll find someone else and