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By Root 561 0

had more people, subsidies, and a concept—but no name. The magazine was christened Expo. After three issues, the staff decided that the magazine would work better on its own, without ties to an association. Stieg and I were really pleased to have young people join in, and we tried to give them as much autonomy as possible. They worked in a basement on a street where Lisbeth Salander lives for a while, in a space like the tiny, stuffy cellar where Millennium was born. At one point Expo had its headquarters in an apartment over the Kaffebar—a coffee bar on Hornsgatan—where Mikael Blomkvist often meets with people. (In Swedish, gatan means “street,” and Hornsgatan is one of the main streets of the Sodermalm district in Stockholm.) The Expo staff was constantly changing locations to escape harassment by neo-Nazi groups, for there was no denying the fact that Expo‘s debut had provoked serious opposition. That April, a small extremist group began issuing threats and vandalizing the premises of all of the parties in Parliament that supported Expo through their Youth Activities sections. Press and book outlets, like the large newsstand on Odengatan, saw their display windows smashed, while the printing house was tagged with swastikas and the warning “Don’t print Expo.” The political parties refused to be intimidated, but the printing house tossed in the towel.

And that led to a sensational development in June 1996: the largest national evening papers, Aftonbladet and Expressen, decided that they would print the current issue of Expo with no strings attached, distributing it as a special supplement to their daily papers. Both editors in chief, Torbjorn Larsson and Christina Jutterstrom, wrote a joint editorial explaining that they wished through their action to defend freedom of speech. Stieg was beside himself with delight. Thanks to this decisive intervention, Expo managed to keep going on its own until 1997, but donations and subscription fees barely covered the rent and printing costs. When the economic crisis arrived, Expo began to falter. In an attempt to save it, we contacted the National Council of Culture, but the grant we received was so small that the editorial staff gave up in exhaustion. (Naturally, everyone had been working full tilt on the magazine in whatever spare time we had—in the evening, during the night, on weekends.) So Expo ceased regular publication, continuing to appear only as a supplement in various publications such as Monitor, a Norwegian antiracist magazine, in 1998, and later in Kurt Baksi’s magazine Svartvitt (Black/White). In this way Expo managed to stay alive thanks to a kind of artificial respiration, but it would be five years before it could appear regularly again as an independent publication.

For Stieg and me, the 1990s were a grueling period during which he worked like a man possessed. What with his job at TT, his work for Searchlight, Expo, and the books he was writing or on which he was collaborating, there really wasn’t any time left for me. I felt very lonely, especially after the financial crash in 1993 cost me my job as an architect in a large construction company, where I’d been thrilled to be working on exciting projects such as the Soder Crescent, an elegant residential complex designed by the Catalan postmodernist architect Ricardo Bofill. Stieg and I were on such different schedules that sometimes we had to make an appointment even to see each other! Snatching some time between TT and Expo, he’d meet me at the Kafe Anna (which turns up in the trilogy, of course) to have a caffe latte together.

I left Stieg twice during those years, even if it was only for a few weeks. The first time, I went to live in an apartment lent to me by a friend, and the next time I stayed with my friend Eleanor. Each time, Stieg was in despair, and even today I feel awful for having put him through that pain—a man who had suffered from such a profound sense of abandonment as a child when his grandfather died. I should have found another way to make him understand that I needed him, especially since