Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [33]
The old man must have thought long and hard how he was going to hook him. Blomkvist had the feeling that every last thing that had happened since he arrived was staged: the introductory surprise that as a child he had met his host, the picture of his parents in the album, and the emphasis on the fact that his father and Vanger had been friends, along with the flattery that the old man knew who Mikael Blomkvist was and that he had been following his career for years from a distance…. No doubt it had a core of truth, but it was also pretty elementary psychology. Vanger was a practised manipulator—how else had he become one of Sweden’s leading industrialists?
Blomkvist decided that Vanger wanted him to do something that he was not going to have the slightest desire to do. He had only to wrest from him what this was and then say no thank you. And just possibly be in time to catch the afternoon train.
“Forgive me, Herr Vanger,” he said, “I’ve been here already for twenty minutes. I’ll give you exactly thirty minutes more to tell me what you want. Then I’m calling a taxi and going home.”
For a moment the mask of the good-natured patriarch slipped, and Blomkvist could detect the ruthless captain of industry from his days of power confronted by a setback. His mouth curled in a grim smile.
“I understand.”
“You don’t have to beat around the bush with me. Tell me what you want me to do, so that I can decide whether I want to do it or not.”
“So if I can’t convince you in half an hour then I wouldn’t be able to do it in a month either—that’s what you think.”
“Something along that line.”
“But my story is long and complicated.”
“Shorten and simplify it. That’s what we do in journalism. Twenty-nine minutes.”
Vanger held up a hand. “Enough. I get your point. But it’s never good psychology to exaggerate. I need somebody who can do research and think critically, but who also has integrity. I think you have it, and that’s not flattery. A good journalist ought to possess these qualities, and I read your book The Knights Templar with great interest. It’s true that I picked you because I knew your father and because I know who you are. If I understood the matter correctly, you left your magazine as a result of the Wennerström affair. Which means that you have no job at the moment, and probably you’re in a tight financial spot.”
“So you might be able to exploit my predicament, is that it?”
“Perhaps. But Mikael—if I may call you Mikael?—I won’t lie to you. I’m too old for that. If you don’t like what I say, you can tell me to jump in the lake. Then I’ll have to find someone else to work with me.”
“OK, tell me what this job involves.”
“How much do you know about the Vanger family?”
“Well, only what I managed to read on the Net since Frode called me on Monday. In your day the Vanger Corporation was one of the most important industrial firms in Sweden; today it’s somewhat diminished. Martin Vanger runs it. I know quite a bit more, but what are you getting at?”
“Martin is…he’s a good man but basically he’s a fair-weather sailor. He’s unsuited to be the managing director of a company in crisis. He wants to modernise and specialise—which is good thinking—but he can’t push through his ideas and his financial management is weak too. Twenty-five years ago the Vanger concern was a serious competitor to the Wallenberg Group. We had forty thousand employees in Sweden. Today many of these jobs are in Korea or Brazil. We are down to about ten thousand employees and in a year or two—if Martin doesn’t get some wind into his sails—we’ll have five thousand, primarily in small manufacturing industries, and the Vanger companies will be consigned to the scrap heap of history.”
Blomkvist nodded. He had come to roughly this conclusion on the basis of the pieces he had downloaded.
“The Vanger companies are still among the few family-held firms in the country. Thirty family members are minority shareholders. This has always been the strength of the corporation, but also our greatest