I don't feel like it, and as far as I'm concerned it's none of your business."
Bublanski raised his eyebrows.
"I come home to find my door broken open and police tape across it, and a guy pumped up on steroids drags me down here. Can I get an explanation?"
"Don't you like men?" Faste said.
Miriam Wu turned and stared at him, astonished. Bublanski gave him a furious look.
"You haven't read any newspapers in the past week? Have you been out of the country?"
"No, I haven't read any papers. I've been in Paris visiting my parents. For two weeks. I just came from Central Station."
"You took the train?"
"I don't like flying."
"And you didn't see any news headlines or Swedish papers today?"
"I got off the night train and took the tunnelbana home."
Bublanski thought for a moment. There hadn't been anything about Salander in the headlines this morning. He stood up and left the room. When he returned he was carrying Aftonbladet's Easter edition with Salander's photograph on the front page. Miriam Wu almost flipped.
Blomkvist followed the directions that Bjorck had given him to the cabin in Smådalaro. As he parked he saw that the "cabin" was a modern one-family home which looked to be habitable all year round. It had a view of the sea towards the Jungfrufjarden inlet. He walked up the gravel path and rang the bell. Bjorck was clearly recognizable from the passport photograph that Svensson had in his file.
"Good morning," Blomkvist said.
"Good, you found the place."
"Thanks to your directions."
"Come in. We can sit in the kitchen."
Bjorck appeared to be in good health, but he had a slight limp.
"I'm on sick leave," he said.
"Nothing serious, I hope."
"I'm waiting to have surgery on a slipped disk. Would you like coffee?"
"No thanks," Blomkvist said and sat at the kitchen table and opened his briefcase. He took out a folder. Bjorck sat down facing him.
"You look familiar. Have we met before?"
"I think not," Blomkvist said.
"I'm sure I've seen you somewhere."
"Maybe in the newspapers."
"What did you say your name was?"
"Mikael Blomkvist. I'm a journalist, I work at Millennium magazine."
Bjorck looked confused. Then the penny dropped. Kalle Blomkvist. The Wennerstrom affair. But still he did not understand the implications.
"Millennium? I didn't know you did market research."
"Once in a while. I'd like to begin by asking you to look at three photographs and tell me which one you like best."
Blomkvist put images of three girls on the table. One had been downloaded from a porn site on the Internet. The other two were blown-up passport photographs.
Bjorck turned pale as a corpse.
"I don't get it."
"No? This is Lidia Komarova, sixteen years old, from Minsk. Next to her is Myang So Chin, goes by the name of Jo-Jo, from Thailand. She's twenty-five. And lastly we have Yelena Barasova, nineteen, from Tallinn. You bought sex from all three of these women, and my question is: which one did you like best? Think of it as market research."
"To sum up, you claim that you have known Lisbeth Salander for about three years. Without expecting to be remunerated she signed over her apartment to you this spring and moved somewhere else. You have sex with her once in a while when she gets in touch, but you don't know where she lives, what kind of work she does, or how she supports herself. Do you expect me to believe that?"
Miriam Wu glowered at him. "I don't give a shit what you believe. I haven't done anything illegal, and how I choose to live my life and who I have sex with is none of your business or anyone else's."
Bublanski sighed. That morning, when he had received news of Miriam Wu's reappearance, he had felt a great sense of relief. Finally a breakthrough. But the information he was getting from her was anything but enlightening. It was most peculiar, in fact. And the problem was that he believed her. She gave clear, intelligible answers, without hesitation. She cited places and dates when she had met Salander, and she gave such a precise account of how it came about that she had moved to Lundagatan that Bublanski and Modig both strongly felt that such a bizarre story had to be true.
Faste had listened to the interview with mounting exasperation, but he managed to keep his mouth shut. He thought that Bublanski was too lenient by far with the Chinese girl, who was an arrogant bitch and used a lot of words to avoid answering the only question that mattered. Namely, where in burning hell