It came from a man with a puffy red face, a halo of frizzy hair and a fussy moustache, whom Blomkvist had seen many times in the area. He thought his name was Arne, and Arne would turn up at the pub as regularly as clockwork at 2.00 every afternoon. Today he had clearly come earlier than that and settled down at a table to the left of the bar with three drinking companions.
“Mikael Blomkvist,” Blomkvist corrected him with a smile.
Arne and his friends laughed as if Blomkvist’s actual name was the biggest joke of all.
“Got any good scoops?” Arne said.
“I’m thinking about blowing wide open the whole murky scene at the Bishops Arms.”
“You reckon Sweden’s ready for a story like that?”
“No, probably not.”
In truth Blomkvist quite liked this crowd, not that he ever talked to them more than in throw-away lines and banter. But these men were a part of the local scene which made him feel at home in the area, and he was not in the least bit offended when one of them shot out, “I’ve heard that you’re washed up.”
Far from upsetting him, it brought the whole campaign against him down to the low, almost farcical level where it belonged.
“I’ve been washed up for the last fifteen years, hello to you brother bottle, all good things must pass,” he said, quoting the poet Fröding and looking around for someone who might have had the gall to order a tired journalist down to the pub. Since he saw no-one apart from Arne and his gang he went up to Amir at the bar.
Amir was big and fat and jolly, a hard-working father of four who had been running the pub for some years. He and Blomkvist had become good friends. Not because Blomkvist was an especially regular customer, but because they had helped each other out in completely different ways; once or twice when Blomkvist had not had the time to get to the state liquor store and was expecting female company, Amir had supplied him with a couple of bottles of red wine, and Blomkvist in turn had helped a friend of Amir’s, who had no papers, to write letters to the authorities.
“To what do we owe this honour?” Amir said.
“I’m meeting someone.”
“Anyone exciting?”
“I don’t think so. How’s Sara?”
Sara was Amir’s wife and had just had a hip operation.
“Complaining and taking painkillers.”
“Sounds like hard work. Give her my best.”
“Will do,” Amir said, and they chatted about this and that.
But Linus Brandell did not show up and Blomkvist thought it was probably a practical joke. On the other hand there were worse tricks than to have someone lure you down to your local pub, so he stayed for fifteen minutes discussing a number of financial and health-related concerns before he turned and walked towards the door, and that was when Brandell appeared.
Nobody understood how Gabriella Grane had ended up at Säpo, Swedish Security Police, least of all she herself. She had been the sort of girl for whom everybody had predicted a glittering future. Her old girlfriends from the classy suburb of Djursholm worried that she was thirty-three and neither famous nor wealthy nor married, either to a rich man or to any man at all for that matter.
“What’s happened to you, Gabriella? Are you going to be a police officer all your life?”
Most of the time she could not be bothered to argue back, or point out that she was not a police officer but had been head-hunted for the position of analyst, and that these days she was writing far more challenging texts than she ever had at the Foreign Ministry or during her summers as a leader writer for Svenska Dagbladet. Apart from which, she was not allowed to talk about most of it in any case. So she might as well keep quiet and simply come to terms with the fact that working for the Swedish Security Police was considered to be about as low as you can go — both by her status-obsessed friends and even more so by her intellectual pals.
In their eyes, Säpo were a bunch of clumsy right-leaning idiots who went after Kurds and Arabs for what were fundamentally racist reasons, and who had no qualms about committing serious crimes or infringements of civil rights in order to protect former senior Soviet spies. And indeed sometimes she was on their side. There was incompetence in the organization, and values that were unsound, and the Zalachenko affair remained a major blot. But that was not the whole truth. Stimulating and important work was being done as well, especially now after the shake-out, and sometimes she had the impression that it was at Säpo, not in any editorial or lecture hall, that people best understood the upheavals that were taking place across the world. But of course she often asked herself: How did I end up here, and why have I stayed?
Presumably some of it was down to flattery. No less a person than Helena Kraft, the newly appointed chief of Säpo at the time, had contacted her and said that after all the disasters and bad press they had to rethink their approach to recruitment. We need to “bring on board the real talents from the universities and, quite honestly Gabriella, there’s no better person than you,” and that was all it had taken.
Grane was hired as an analyst in counter-espionage and later in the Industry Protection Group. Even though as a young woman, attractive in a slightly proper sort of way, she got called a “daddy’s girl” and “snotty upper-class bitch”, she was a star recruit, quick and receptive and able to think outside the box. And she could speak Russian. She had learned it alongside her studies at the Stockholm School of Economics, where needless to say she had been a model student but never that keen. She dreamed of something bigger than a life in business, so after her graduation she applied for a job at the Foreign Ministry and of course was accepted. But she did not find that especially stimulating either — the diplomats were too stiff and neatly combed. It was then that Helena Kraft had got in touch. Grane had been at Säpo for five years now and had gradually been accepted for the talent that she was, even if it was not always easy.
It had been a trying day, and not just because of the ghastly weather. The head of division, Ragnar Olofsson, had appeared in her office looking surly and humourless and told her that she should damn well not be flirting when she was out on an assignment.
“Flirting?”
“Flowers have been delivered.”
“And that’s my fault?”
“Yes, I do think you have a responsibility there. When we’re out in the field we have to show discipline and reserve at all times. We represent an absolutely key public agency.”
“Well, that’s great, Ragnar dear. One always learns something from you. Now I finally understand that I’m responsible for the fact that the head of research at Ericsson can’t tell the difference between normal polite behaviour and flirting. Now I realize that I should blame myself when men indulge in such wildly wishful thinking that they see a sexual invitation in a simple smile.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Olofsson said, and he disappeared. Later she regretted having answered back.
That kind of outburst rarely does any good. On the other hand, she had been taking shit for far too long. It was time to stand up for herself. She quickly tidied her desk and got out a report from G.C.H.Q. in Britain about Russian industrial espionage against European software companies, which she had not yet had time to read. Then the telephone rang. It was Kraft, and that made Grane happy. She had never yet called to complain or moan. On the contrary.
“I’ll get straight to the point,” Kraft said. “I’ve had a call from the U.S., it may be a bit of an emergency. Can you take it on your Cisco? We’ve arranged a secure line.”
“Of course.”
“Good. I’d like you to interpret the information for me, see if there’s anything in it. It sounds serious, but I can’t get a handle on the person who’s passing on the information — who, by the way, says that she knows you.”