Blomkvist sighed. Obviously Vanger was not going to let him go in time to catch
the afternoon train. He was sure that if he called Frode to ask for a lift to the station,
the car would somehow refuse to start in the cold.
The old man must have thought long and hard how he was going to hook him.
Blomkvist had the feeling that every last thing that had happened since he arrived
was staged: the introductory surprise that as a child he had met his host, the
picture of his parents in the album, and the emphasis on the fact that his father and
Vanger had been friends, along with the flattery that the old man knew who Mikael
Blomkvist was and that he had been following his career for years from a
distance.... No doubt it had a core of truth, but it was also pretty elementary
psychology. Vanger was a practised manipulator—how else had he become one of
Sweden’s leading industrialists?
Blomkvist decided that Vanger wanted him to do something that he was not going
to have the slightest desire to do. He had only to wrest from him what this was and
then say no thank you. And just possibly be in time to catch the afternoon train.
“Forgive me, Herr Vanger,” he said, “I’ve been here already for twenty minutes. I’ll
give you exactly thirty minutes more to tell me what you want. Then I’m calling a
taxi and going home.”
For a moment the mask of the good-natured patriarch slipped, and Blomkvist
could detect the ruthless captain of industry from his days of power confronted by
a setback. His mouth curled in a grim smile.
“I understand.”
“You don’t have to beat around the bush with me. Tell me what you want me to do,
so that I can decide whether I want to do it or not.”
“So if I can’t convince you in half an hour then I wouldn’t be able to do it in a month
either—that’s what you think.”
“Something along that line.”
“But my story is long and complicated.”
“Shorten and simplify it. That’s what we do in journalism. Twenty-nine minutes.”