During the first days of the media frenzy, Blomkvist was invisible. He did not answer
his emails and could not be reached by telephone. All editorial comments on
behalf of Millennium were made by Berger, who purred like a cat as she was
interviewed by the Swedish national media and important regional newspapers,
and eventually also by a growing number of overseas media. Each time she was
asked how Millennium had come into possession of all those private and internal
documents, she replied simply that she was unable to reveal the magazine’s
source.
When she was asked why the previous year’s exposé of Wennerström had been
such a fiasco, she was even more delphic. She never lied, but she may not always
have told the whole truth. Off the record, when she did not have a microphone
under her nose, she would utter a few mysterious catch phrases, which, if pieced
together, led to some rather rash conclusions. That is how a rumour was born that
soon assumed legendary proportions, claiming that Mikael Blomkvist had not
presented any sort of defence at his trial and had voluntarily submitted to the
prison sentence and heavy fines because otherwise his documentation would have
led inevitably to the identification of his source. He was compared to role models in
the American media who had accepted gaol rather than reveal their sources, and
Blomkvist was described as a hero in such ludicrously flattering terms that he was
quite embarrassed. But this was no time to deny the misunderstanding.
There was one thing that everyone agreed on: the person who had delivered the
documentation had to be someone within Wennerström’s most trusted circle. This
led to a debate about who the “Deep Throat” was: colleagues with reason to be
dissatisfied, lawyers, even Wennerström’s cocaine-addicted daughter and other
family members were put up as possible candidates. Neither Blomkvist nor Berger
commented on the subject.
Berger smiled happily, knowing that they had won when an evening paper on the
third day of the frenzy ran the headline MILLENNIUM’S REVENGE. The article was an
ingratiating portrait of the magazine and its staff, including illustrations with a
particularly favourable portrait of Berger. She was named the “queen of
investigative journalism.” That sort of thing won points in the rankings of the
entertainment pages, and there was talk of the Big Journalism Prize.
Five days after Millennium fired the first salvo, Blomkvist’s book The Mafia
Banker appeared in bookshops. The book had been written during those feverish