The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo m(-1 Read online

  The report had created precisely the chaos that Armansky had wanted to avoid. First he had to swallow a few ulcer tablets prescribed by his doctor. Then he called in the client for a sombre emergency meeting. Finally – over the client’s fierce objections – he was forced to refer the material to the police. This meant that Milton Security risked being drawn into a tangled web. If Salander’s evidence could not be substantiated or the man was acquitted, the company might risk a libel suit. It was a nightmare.

  However, it was not Lisbeth Salander’s astonishing lack of emotional involvement that most upset him. Milton’s image was one of conservative stability. Salander fitted into this picture about as well as a buffalo at a boat show. Armansky’s star researcher was a pale, anorexic young woman who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about an inch long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle. On those occasions when she had been wearing a tank top, Armansky also saw that she had a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade. She was a natural redhead, but she dyed her hair raven black. She looked as though she had just emerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers.

  She did not in fact have an eating disorder, Armansky was sure of that. On the contrary, she seemed to consume every kind of junk food. She had simply been born thin, with slender bones that made her look girlish and fine-limbed with small hands, narrow wrists, and childlike breasts. She was twenty-four, but she sometimes looked fourteen.

  She had a wide mouth, a small nose, and high cheekbones that gave her an almost Asian look. Her movements were quick and spidery, and when she was working at the computer her fingers flew over the keys. Her extreme slenderness would have made a career in modelling impossible, but with the right make-up her face could have put her on any billboard in the world. Sometimes she wore black lipstick, and in spite of the tattoos and the pierced nose and eyebrows she was… well… attractive. It was inexplicable.

  The fact that Salander worked for Dragan Armansky at all was astonishing. She was not the sort of woman with whom he would normally come into contact.

  She had been hired as a jill-of-all-trades. Holger Palmgren, a semi-retired lawyer who looked after old J. F. Milton’s personal affairs, had told Armansky that this Lisbeth Salander was a quick-witted girl with “a rather trying attitude.” Palmgren had appealed to him to give her a chance, which Armansky had, against his better judgement, promised to do. Palmgren was the type of man who would only take “no” as an encouragement to redouble his efforts, so it was easier to say “yes” right away. Armansky knew that Palmgren devoted himself to troubled kids and other social misfits, but he did have good judgement.

  He had regretted his decision to hire the girl the moment he met her. She did not just seem difficult – in his eyes she was the very quintessence of difficult. She had dropped out of school and had no sort of higher education.

  The first few months she had worked full time, well, almost full time. She turned up at the office now and then. She made coffee, went to the post office, and took care of the copying, but conventional office hours or work routines were anathema to her. On the other hand, she had a talent for irritating the other employees. She became known as “the girl with two brain cells” – one for breathing and one for standing up. She never talked about herself. Colleagues who tried to talk to her seldom got a response and soon gave up. Her attitude encouraged neither trust nor friendship, and she quickly became an outsider wandering the corridors of Milton like a stray cat. She was generally considered a hopeless case.

  After a month of nothing but trouble, Armansky sent for her, fully intending to let her go. She listened to his catalogue of her offences without objection and without even raising an eyebrow. She did not have the “right attitude,” he concluded, and was about to tell her that it would probably be a good idea if she looked for employment with another firm that could make better use of her skills. Only then did she interrupt him.

  “You know, if you just want an office serf you can get one from the temp agency. I can handle anything and anyone you want, and if you don’t have any better use for me than sorting post, then you’re an idiot.”

  Armansky sat there, stunned and angry, and she went on unperturbed.

  “You have a man here who spent three weeks writing a completely useless report about that yuppie they’re thinking of recruiting for that dot-com company. I copied the piece of crap for him last night, and I see it’s lying on your desk now.”

  Armansky’s eyes went to the report, and for a change he raised his voice.

  “You’re not supposed to read confidential reports.”

  “Apparently not, but the security routines in your firm have a number of shortcomings. According to your directive he’s supposed to copy such things himself, but he chucked the report at me before he left for the bar yesterday. And by the way, I found his previous report in the canteen.”

  “You did what?”

  “Calm down. I put it in his in-box.”

  “Did he give you the combination to his document safe?” Armansky was aghast.

  “Not exactly; he wrote it on a piece of paper he kept underneath his blotter along with the password to his computer. But the point is that your joke of a private detective has done a worthless personal investigation. He missed the fact that the guy has old gambling debts and snorts cocaine like a vacuum cleaner. Or that his girlfriend had to seek help from the women’s crisis centre after he beat the shit out of her.”

  Armansky sat for a couple of minutes turning the pages of the report. It was competently set out, written in clear language, and filled with source references as well as statements from the subject’s friends and acquaintances. Finally he raised his eyes and said two words: “Prove it.”

  “How much time have I got?”

  “Three days. If you can’t prove your allegations by Friday afternoon you’re fired.”

  Three days later she delivered a report which, with equally exhaustive source references, transformed the outwardly pleasant young yuppie into an unreliable bastard. Armansky read her report over the weekend, several times, and spent part of Monday doing a half-hearted double-check of some of her assertions. Even before he began he knew that her information would prove to be accurate.

  Armansky was bewildered and also angry with himself for having so obviously misjudged her. He had taken her for stupid, maybe even retarded. He had not expected that a girl who had cut so many classes in school that she did not graduate could write a report so grammatically correct. It also contained detailed observations and information, and he quite simply could not comprehend how she could have acquired such facts.

  He could not imagine that anyone else at Milton Security would have lifted excerpts from the confidential journal of a doctor at a women’s crisis centre. When he asked her how she had managed that, she told him that she had no intention of burning her sources. It became clear that Salander was not going to discuss her work methods, either with him or with anyone else. This disturbed him – but not enough for him to resist the temptation to test her.

  He thought about the matter for several days. He recalled Holger Palmgren’s saying when he had sent her to him, “Everyone deserves a chance.” He thought about his own Muslim upbringing, which had taught him that it was his duty to God to help the outcasts. Of course he did not believe in God and had not been in a mosque since he was a teenager, but he recognised Lisbeth Salander as a person in need of resolute help. He had not done much along these lines over the past few decades.

  Instead of giving Salander the boot, he summoned her for a meeting in which he tried to work out what made the difficult girl tick. His impression was confirmed that she suffered from some serious emotional problem, but he also discovered that behind her sullen facade there was an unusual intelligence. He found her prickly and irksome, but much to his surprise he began to like her.

  Over the following months Armansky took Sal
ander under his wing. In truth, he took her on as a small social project. He gave her straightforward research tasks and tried to give her guidelines on how to proceed. She would listen patiently and then set off to carry out the assignment just as she saw fit. He asked Milton’s technical director to give her a basic course in IT science. They sat together all afternoon until he reported back that she seemed to have a better understanding of computers than most of the staff.

  But despite development discussions, offers of in-house training, and other forms of enticement, it was evident that Salander had no intention of adapting to Milton’s office routines. This put Armansky in a difficult spot.

  He would not have put up with any other employee coming and going at will, and under normal circumstances he would have demanded that she change or go. But he had a hunch that if he gave Salander an ultimatum or threatened to fire her she would simply shrug her shoulders and be gone.

  A more serious problem was that he could not be sure of his own feelings for the young woman. She was like a nagging itch, repellent and at the same time tempting. It was not a sexual attraction, at least he did not think so. The women he was usually attracted to were blonde and curvaceous, with full lips that aroused his fantasies. And besides, he had been married for twenty years to a Finnish woman named Ritva who still more than satisfied these requirements. He had never been unfaithful, well… something may have happened just once, and his wife might have misunderstood if she had known about it. But the marriage was happy and he had two daughters of Salander’s age. In any case, he was not interested in flat-chested girls who might be mistaken for skinny boys at a distance. That was not his style.

  Even so, he had caught himself having inappropriate daydreams about Lisbeth Salander, and he recognised that he was not completely unaffected by her. But the attraction, Armansky thought, was that Salander was a foreign creature to him. He might just as well have fallen in love with a painting of a nymph or a Greek amphora. Salander represented a life that was not real for him, that fascinated him though he could not share it – and in any case she forbade him from sharing it.

  On one occasion Armansky was sitting at a café on Stortorget in Gamla Stan when Salander came sauntering up and sat at a table a short distance away. She was with three girls and a boy, all dressed in much the same way. Armansky had watched her with interest. She seemed to be just as reserved as she was at work, but she had actually almost smiled at a story told by one of her companions, a girl with purple hair.

  Armansky wondered how she would react if one day he came to work with green hair, worn-out jeans, and a leather jacket covered with graffiti and rivets. She probably would just smirk at him.

  She had been sitting with her back to him and did not turn around once, obviously unaware that he was there. He felt strangely disturbed by her presence. When at last he got up to slink away unnoticed, she suddenly turned and stared straight at him, as though she had been aware all the time that he was sitting there and had him on her radar. Her gaze had come so surprisingly that it felt like an attack, and he pretended not to see her and hurriedly left the café. She had not said hello even, but she followed him with her eyes, he was sure of it, and not until he turned the corner did they stop burning into his neck.

  She rarely laughed. But over time Armansky thought he noticed a softening of her attitude. She had a dry sense of humour, to put it mildly, which could prompt a crooked, ironic smile.

  Armansky felt so provoked by her lack of emotional response that sometimes he wanted to grab hold of her and shake her. To force his way into her shell and win her friendship, or at least her respect.

  Only once, after she had been working for him for nine months, had he tried to discuss these feelings with her. It was at Milton Security’s Christmas party one evening in December, and for once he was not sober. Nothing inappropriate had happened – he had just tried to tell her that he actually liked her. Most of all he wanted to explain that he felt protective towards her, and if she ever needed help with anything, she should not hesitate to come to him. He had even tried to give her a hug. All in friendliness, of course.

  She had wriggled out of his clumsy embrace and left the party. After that she had not appeared at the office or answered her mobile. Her absence had felt like torture – almost a form of personal punishment. He had nobody to discuss his feelings with, and for the first time he realised with appalling clarity what a destructive hold she had over him.

  Three weeks later, when Armansky was working late one evening going over the year-end bookkeeping, Salander reappeared. She came into his office as silently as a ghost, and he became aware that she was standing in the shadows inside the doorway, watching him. He had no idea how long she had been there.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she asked. She handed him a cup from the espresso machine in the canteen. Mutely he accepted it, feeling both relief and terror when she shoved the door closed with her foot. She sat down opposite his desk and looked him straight in the eye. Then she asked the question in a way that could neither be laughed off nor avoided.

  “Dragan, are you attracted to me?”

  Armansky sat as if paralysed, while desperately wondering how to answer. His first impulse was to pretend to be insulted. Then he saw her expression and it came to him that this was the first time she had ever uttered any such personal question. It was seriously meant, and if he tried to laugh it off she would take it as an affront. She wanted to talk to him, and he wondered how long it had taken her to get up the courage to ask that question. He slowly put down his pen and leaned back in his chair. Finally he relaxed.

  “What makes you think that?” he said.

  “The way you look at me, and the way you don’t look at me. And the times you were about to reach out your hand and touch me but stopped yourself.”

  He smiled at her. “I reckon you’d bite off my hand if I laid a finger on you.”

  She did not smile. She was waiting.

  “Lisbeth, I’m your boss, and even if I were attracted to you, I’d never act on it.”

  She was still waiting.

  “Between us – yes, there have been times when I have felt attracted to you. I can’t explain it, but that’s the way it is. For some reason I don’t really understand, I like you a lot. But it’s not a physical thing.”

  “That’s good. Because it’ll never happen.”

  Armansky laughed. The first time she had said something personal and it was the most disheartening news a man could imagine receiving. He struggled to find the right words.

  “Lisbeth, I understand that you’re not interested in an old man of fifty plus.”

  “I’m not interested in an old man of fifty plus who’s my boss.” She held up a hand. “Wait, let me speak. You’re sometimes stupid and maddeningly bureaucratic, but you’re actually an attractive man, and… I can also feel… But you’re my boss and I’ve met your wife and I want to keep my job with you, and the most idiotic thing I could do is get involved with you.”

  Armansky said nothing, hardly daring to breathe.

  “I’m aware of what you’ve done for me, and I’m not ungrateful. I appreciate that you actually showed yourself to be greater than your prejudices and have given me a chance here. But I don’t want you for my lover, and you’re not my father.”

  After a while Armansky sighed helplessly. “What exactly do you want from me?”

  “I want to continue working for you. If that’s OK with you.”

  He nodded and then answered her as honestly as he could. “I really do want you to work for me. But I also want you to feel some sort of friendship and trust in me.”

  She nodded.

  “You’re not a person who encourages friendship,” he said. She seemed to withdraw, but he went on. “I understand that you don’t want anyone interfering in your life, and I’ll try not to do that. But is it all right if I continue to like you?”

  Salander thought about it for a long time. Then she replied by getting up, walking aro
und the desk, and giving him a hug. He was totally shocked. Only when she released him did he take her hand.

  “We can be friends?”

  She nodded once.

  That was the only time she ever showed him any tenderness, and the only time she ever touched him. It was a moment that Armansky fondly remembered.

  After four years she had still vouchsafed hardly a detail about her private life or her background to Armansky. Once he applied his own knowledge of the pinder’s art on her. He also had a long talk with Holger Palmgren – who did not seem surprised to see him – and what he finally found out did not increase his trust in her. He never mentioned a word about this to her or let her know that he had been snooping into her life. Instead he hid his uneasiness and increased his watchfulness.

  Before that strange evening was over, Armansky and Salander had come to an agreement. In future she would do research projects for him on a freelance basis. She would receive a small monthly income whether she did any assignments or not. The real money would be made when she was paid per assignment. She could work the way she wanted to; in return she pledged never to do anything that might embarrass him or risk subjecting Milton Security to scandal.

  For Armansky this was a solution that was advantageous to him, the company, and Salander herself. He cut the troublesome PI department down to a single full-time employee, an older colleague who handled routine jobs perfectly well and ran credit checks. All complicated or tricky assignments he turned over to Salander and a few other freelancers who – in the last resort – were independent contractors for whom Milton Security had actually no responsibility. Since he regularly engaged her services, she earned a good salary. It could have been much higher, but Salander worked only when she felt like it.

  Armansky accepted her as she was, but she was not allowed to meet the clients. Today’s assignment was an exception.