The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (25 page)

But first and foremost, Django was a traveller – or Roma, as people now said. Daniel was also Roma. He had learned this the hard way – through the pain of being excluded, and being called a “gyppo” and worse. It had never crossed his mind that this was anything other than deeply shameful. Now Django allowed him to look upon his origins with a new pride. If Django could become the world’s best with a severely damaged hand, Daniel too could become something special.

He borrowed some money from a girl in his class, bought a compilation record of Reinhardt’s tunes and taught himself all the classics – “Minor Swing”, “Daphne”, “Belleville”, “Djangology” and many more – and in no time at all he changed the way he played the guitar. He abandoned his blues scales and instead played minor sixth arpeggios and solos with diminished major and minor seventh scales, and with each day his passion grew. He practised until he had leathery callouses on his fingertips. His fervour never dimmed – not even when he slept. He played in his dreams. He thought of nothing else, and whenever he had the chance he would make for the forest, sit on a rock or a tree stump and improvise for hours on end. Hungrily he absorbed new skills and new influences, not just from Django but also from John Scofield, Pat Metheny and Mike Stern, all the modern jazz guitar greats.

At the same time, his relationship with Sten deteriorated. “You think you’re special, don’t you? You’re just a little shit,” his foster father would often snarl, adding that Daniel always walked around with his nose in the air. Daniel could not understand it, he who had always felt inferior and inadequate. He tried his best to oblige, even though he neither wanted to, nor could, stop his playing. Before long Sten began to beat him around the ears and punch him, and sometimes his foster brothers joined in. They hit him in the stomach and on his arms, and punished him with loud noises, metal scraping against metal or saucepan lids clashed together. Daniel now hated the work in the fields, especially in summer when there was no escape from the muck-spreading, ploughing, harrowing and sowing.

During the summer months the boys would work from morning until late at night. Daniel tried hard to be liked and accepted again, and sometimes he succeeded. In the evenings he was happy to play requests for his brothers, and occasionally he won applause and a certain appreciation. Yet he knew that he was a burden and made himself scarce whenever he could.

One afternoon, as the sun beat down on the back of his neck, he heard a blackbird singing far away. He was sixteen and already dreaming of his eighteenth birthday, when he would come of age and could leave this place far behind. He was planning to apply to the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, or get a job as a jazz musician, putting so much effort and ambition into his work that one day he would get a record contract. Dreams spun around in his head day and night. At times, as happened now, nature fed him a sound which he developed into a riff.

He whistled back at the blackbird, a variation on its song which became a melody. His fingers moved as if over an imaginary guitar, and he shuddered. Later, as an adult, he would think back to those moments when he believed something would be irretrievably lost if he did not sit down straight away to compose, and nothing in the world would stop him from sneaking off to get his guitar. Daniel could still recall the illicit thrill in his chest as he raced down to the water at Blackåstjärnen in his bare feet, overalls flapping and guitar in hand, and settled on the dilapidated jetty to pick out the melody he had been whistling and give it an accompaniment. It was a wonderful time, that is how he would remember it.

But it did not last long. One of the other boys must have seen him go and ratted on him. Sten soon appeared bare-chested and in his shorts, and furious, and Daniel, who did not know whether to apologize or simply disappear, hesitated a second too long. Sten managed to grab hold of the guitar and yanked it away with such violence that he fell over backwards. It was not a bad fall, it just looked ridiculous. But something in Sten snapped. He got to his feet, his face puce, and smashed the guitar against the jetty. Afterwards he looked shocked – as if he did not quite understand what he had done. But it made no difference.

Daniel felt as if a vital organ had been torn from his body. He yelled “idiot” and “bastard”, words he had never before uttered in front of Sten. He ran across the fields, burst into the house, stuffed his records and some clothes into a rucksack, and left the farm for good.

He made for the E4 motorway and walked for hours, until he picked up a lift in an articulated lorry as far as Gävle. Then he continued south, sleeping in the forest, stealing apples and plums and eating berries he found along the way. An old lady who drove him to Södertälje gave him a ham sandwich. A young man who took him to Jönköping bought him lunch, and late in the evening on July 22 he arrived in Göteborg. Within a few days he had got himself some low-paid, cash-in-hand work down at the docks. Six weeks later, living on virtually nothing and having occasionally slept in stairwells, he bought himself a new guitar, not a Selmer Maccaferri – Django’s guitar, which he dreamed of owning – but a second-hand Ibanez.

He decided to make his way to New York. But it was not as easy as people said. He had neither a passport nor a visa and you could no longer earn passage on a ship, not even as a cleaner. Early one evening, when he had finished his work in the harbour, a woman was waiting for him at the dockside. Her name was Ann-Catrine Lidholm. She was overweight and dressed in pink, and she had kind eyes. She told him she was a social worker, and that someone had called her about him. That was when he found out that people were searching for him, that he had been reported as missing, and he followed her reluctantly to the social welfare agency on Järntorget.

Ann-Catrine explained that she had spoken to Sten on the telephone and had a positive impression of him, which made Daniel even more suspicious.

“He misses you,” she said.

“Bullshit,” he said, and told her that he could not go back. He would be beaten, his life would be hell. Ann-Catrine listened to his story and afterwards gave him a few options, none of which felt right. He said he could manage on his own, she didn’t need to worry. Ann-Catrine replied that he was still a minor and that he needed support and guidance.

That was when he remembered the “Stockholm people”, as he thought of them: psychologists and doctors who had visited him every year of his childhood. They had measured and weighed him, interviewed him and taken notes. And they had made him take tests, all kinds of tests. He never much liked them and sometimes he had cried afterwards. He felt lonely and exposed to scrutiny, and he had thought of his mother and the life he never had with her. On the other hand, he did not hate them either. They would give him encouraging smiles and praise, and they said what a good and clever boy he was. There had never been a single unkind word. Nor did he see the visits as anything out of the ordinary. He thought it perfectly normal that the authorities should want to see how he was getting along with his foster family, and the fact that people were writing about him in medical records and protocols did not bother him. To him, it was a sign that he counted for something. Depending on who came to see him, he sometimes even viewed the visits as a welcome relief from work on the farm, especially more recently when the Stockholm people had shown an interest in his music and filmed him as he played the guitar. A few times, they seemed impressed and whispered to each other, and he had gone on to dream of how those films might get around and end up in the hands of agents or record producers.

The psychologists and doctors never gave more than their first names, and he knew nothing about them – apart from one woman who shook his hand one day and introduced herself with her full name, presumably by mistake. But that was not the only reason he remembered her. He had been entranced by her figure and her long, strawberry-blonde hair, and the high heels which were so unsuited to the dirt paths around the farmhouse. The woman had smiled at him, as if she genuinely liked him. Her name was Hilda von Kanterborg and she wore low-cut blouses and dresses, and had full red lips which he dreamed of kissing.

This was the woman he thought of when he asked if he could make a call from the social welfare offices. He was given a telephone directory for the Stockholm area and nervously flicked through it. For a moment he was convinced that Hilda von Kanterborg had been a cover, and that was the first time it crossed his mind that the Stockholm people might not be regular officials of the social welfare system. But then he did find her name and dialled the number. There was no answer, so he left a message.

When he returned the next day, having spent the night at Göteborg City Mission, she had returned his call and left another number. This time she answered and seemed happy to hear his voice. Straight away he realized that she knew he had run away. She told him that she was “terribly sorry” and said he was “exceptionally gifted”. He felt unbearably lonely and stifled an impulse to cry.

“Well, help me, then,” he said.

“My dear Daniel,” she said, “I would do just about anything. But we’re supposed to study, not to intervene.”

Daniel would return to that time and again over the years; it was one of the factors that made him take on a new identity and guard it with all his might. But right then, gripping the receiver, he felt miserable and blurted out: “What, what are you talking about?” Hilda became nervous, he could tell. She swiftly began to talk about other things, how he needed to finish school before he made any rash decisions. He said that all he wanted was to play the guitar. Hilda told him he could study music. He replied that he wanted to go to sea and make his way to New York to play in the jazz clubs there. She advised strongly against that: “Not at your age, and not with everything you’ve got going for you,” she said.

They talked for so long that Ann-Catrine and the other social workers were beginning to get impatient, and he promised to think about the options she had given him. He said he hoped to see her. She said she’d like that, but it did not come to pass. He was never to see her again.

People seemed to appear from nowhere to help him get a passport, a visa and a job as a kitchen worker and waiter on a Wallenius Lines freighter. He never understood how it all happened. The freighter would take him, not to New York, but to Boston. He found a slip of paper stapled to his employment contract with the following words in blue ballpoint pen: “Berklee College of Music, Boston, Massachusetts. Good luck! H.”

His life would never be the same again. He became an American citizen and changed his name to Dan Brody, and the years that followed were full of wonderful, exciting experiences. And yet, deep down, he felt disillusioned and alone. He nearly had a break-through at the start of his career. One day, jamming at Ryles Jazz Club on Hampshire Street in Boston, he played a solo which was both in the spirit of Django and at the same time something else, something new, and a murmur went through the audience. People began to talk about him and he got to know the managers and scouts of record companies. But in the end they felt he was lacking something, courage perhaps – and self-confidence. Deals fell through at the last minute, and he was eclipsed by others who were less talented and yet somehow more enterprising. He would have to be satisfied with a life in the shadows; he would be the one sitting behind the star. He would always miss the fervour he had felt as he played on the jetty at Blackåstjärnen.

Salander had tracked down several larger hand motion data-sets – used for medical research and to develop robots – and had fed them into Hacker Republic’s deep neural networks. She had been working so hard that she had forgotten to eat and drink, despite the heat. Finally she looked up from the computer and poured herself a glass, not of water, but of Tullamore Dew.

She had longed for alcohol. She had longed for sex, sunlight, junk food, the smell of the sea and the buzz of bars. And she had longed for the feeling of freedom. But for now she made do with Irish whiskey. It might not be bad to end up reeking like a drunken bum, she thought. No-one expects much from a wino. She looked out over Riddarfjärden and closed her eyes for a few moments. She stretched her back and let the algorithms in the neural network do their job while she went into the kitchen and microwaved a pizza. Then she rang Annika Giannini.

Annika was not pleased to hear what she was planning. She advised strongly against it, but when that fell on deaf ears she told Salander that the most she could do was film the suspect, nothing more. She recommended that Salander get in touch with Hassan Ferdousi, the imam. He would help her with “the more human aspects”. Salander ignored this advice, but that did not matter as Annika later contacted the imam herself, and sent him off to Vallholmen.

Salander dug into her pizza and drank whiskey, and then hacked into Blomkvist’s computer to type into the file he had called
LISBETH STUFF
:

Hilda is Hilda von Kanterborg. Find her.

Also check out Daniel Brolin. He’s a guitarist, very talented. Am busy with other things. Will be in touch.>

Blomkvist saw Salander’s message and was thankful that she had been released. He tried to call her. When there was no answer he cursed. So she too knew about Hilda von Kanterborg. What could that mean? Did she know her personally, or had she obtained the information by other means? He had no idea. But he needed no encouragement from Salander to go after von Kanterborg. He had already set his mind on that.

On the other hand, he had not been able to discover where this Daniel Brolin came into it. He found many different Daniel Brolins on the net, but none was a guitar player, or any kind of musician at all. Perhaps he was not trying as hard as he might have. He had got too involved following up other leads.

It had started the evening before, with the article Hilda’s sister had told him about. When he first read it, it seemed unremarkable, too general to contain anything revelatory, let alone controversial. Hilda – under the pseudonym Leonard Bark – wrote about how the classic nature versus nurture debate had become politicized long ago. The Left would like us to believe that our prospects in life are primarily determined by social factors, while the Right argues for the influence of genetics.