friends know. And now here I am, sitting in your kitchen and eating bagels with
you. We have known each other half an hour, but I have the feeling that we’ve been
friends for years. Does that make sense to you?”
She nodded.
“You have beautiful eyes,” he said.
“You have nice eyes yourself,” she said.
Long silence.
“Why are you here?” she said.
Kalle Blomkvist—she remembered his nickname and suppressed the impulse to say
it out loud—suddenly looked serious. He also looked very tired. The self-confidence
that he had shown when he first walked into her apartment was now gone. The
clowning was over, or at least had been put aside. She felt him studying her closely.
Salander felt that her composure was barely skin-deep and that she really wasn’t in
complete control of her nerves. This totally unlooked-for visit had shaken her in a
way that she had never experienced in connection with her work. Her bread and
butter was spying on people. In fact she had never thought of what she did for
Armansky as a real job; she thought of it more as a complicated pastime, a sort of
hobby.
The truth was that she enjoyed digging into the lives of other people and exposing
the secrets they were trying to hide. She had been doing it, in one form or another,
for as long as she could remember. And she was still doing it today, not only when
Armansky gave her an assignment, but sometimes for the sheer fun of it. It gave
her a kick. It was like a complicated computer game, except that it dealt with real
live people. And now one of her hobbies was sitting right here in her kitchen,
feeding her bagels. It was totally absurd.
“I have a fascinating problem,” Blomkvist said. “Tell me this, when you were doing
your research on me for Herr Frode, did you have any idea what it was going to be
used for?”
“No.”