never understood Berger’s love for him. But he was glad that he accepted that she
could love two men at the same time.
Blomkvist could not sleep, and at 4:00 he gave up. He went to the kitchen and read
the court judgement one more time from beginning to end. Having the document
in his hand he had a sense that there had been something almost fateful about the
meeting at Arholma. He could never be sure whether Lindberg had told him the
details of Wennerström’s swindle simply for the sake of a good story between
toasts in the privacy of his boat’s cabin or whether he had really wanted the story
to be made public.
He tended to believe the first. But it may have been that Lindberg, for his own
personal or business reasons, had wanted to damage Wennerström, and he had
seized the opportunity of having a captive journalist on board. Lindberg had been
sober enough to insist on Blomkvist treating him as an anonymous source. From
that moment Lindberg could say what he liked, because his friend would never be
able to disclose his source.
If the meeting at Arholma had been a set-up, then Lindberg could not have played
his role better. But the meeting had to have happened by chance.
Lindberg could have had no notion of the extent of Blomkvist’s contempt for
people like Wennerström. For all that, after years of study, he was privately
convinced that there was not a single bank director or celebrity corporate
executive who wasn’t also a cretin.
Blomkvist had never heard of Lisbeth Salander and was happily innocent of her
report delivered earlier that day, but had he listened to it he would have nodded in
agreement when she spoke of his loathing for bean counters, saying that it was not
a manifestation of his left-wing political radicalism. Mikael was not uninterested in
politics, but he was extremely sceptical of political “isms.” He had voted only once
in a parliamentary election—in 1982—and then he had hesitantly plumped for the
Social Democrats, there being nothing in his imagination worse than three years
more with Gösta Bohman as finance minister and Thorbjörn Fälldin (or possibly Ola
Ullsten) as prime minister. So he had voted for Olof Palme, and got instead the
assassination of his prime minister plus the Bofors scandal and Ebbe Carlsson.