office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.
Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.
Then she studied the offerings of estate agents online. The next morning she got up early to visit Nobel Estates, the company that, according to some, had the best reputation in Stockholm. She was dressed in old black jeans, boots, and her black leather jacket. She stood at a counter and watched a blond woman of about thirty-five, who had just logged on to the Nobel Estates website and was uploading photographs of apartments. At length a short, plump, middle-aged man with thin red hair came over. She asked him what sort of apartments he had available. He looked up at her in surprise and then assumed an avuncular tone:
"Well, young lady, do your parents know that you're thinking of moving away from home?"
Salander gave him a stone-cold glare until he stopped chuckling.
"I want an apartment," she said.
He cleared his throat and glanced appealingly at his colleague on the computer.
"I see. And what kind of apartment did you have in mind?"
"I think I'd like an apartment in Soder, with a balcony and a view of the water, at least four rooms, a bathroom with a window, and a utility room. And there has to be a lockable area where I can keep a motorcycle."
The woman at the computer looked up and stared at Salander.
"A motorcycle?" the thin-haired man said.
Salander nodded.
"May I know... uh, your name?"
Salander told him. She asked him for his name and he introduced himself as Joakim Persson.
"The thing is, it's rather expensive to purchase a cooperative apartment here in Stockholm... "
Salander did not reply. She had asked him what sort of apartments he had to offer; the information that it cost money was irrelevant.
"What line of work are you in?"
Salander thought for a moment. Technically she was a freelancer; in practice she worked only for Armansky and Milton Security, but that had been somewhat irregular over the past year. She had not done any work for him in three months.
"I'm not working at anything at the moment," she said.
"Well then... I presume you're still at school."
"No, I'm not at school."
Persson came around the counter and put his arm kindly around Salander's shoulders, escorting her towards the door.
"Well, you see, Ms. Salander, we'd be happy to welcome you back in a few years' time, but you'd have to bring along a little more money than what's in your piggy bank. The fact is that a weekly allowance won't really cover this." He pinched her good-naturedly on the cheek. "So drop in again, and we'll see about finding you a little pad."
Salander stood on the street outside Nobel Estates for several minutes. She wondered absentmindedly what little Master Persson would think if a Molotov cocktail came flying through his display window. Then she went home and booted up her PowerBook.
It took her ten minutes to hack into Nobel Estates' internal computer network using the passwords she happened to notice the woman behind the counter type in before she started uploading photographs. It took three minutes to find out that the computer the woman was working on was in fact also the company's Net server - how dim can you get? - and another three minutes to gain access to all fourteen computers on the network. After about two hours she had gone through Persson's records and discovered that there were some 750,000 kronor in under-the-table income that he had not reported to the tax authorities over the past two years.
She downloaded all the necessary files and emailed them to the tax authorities from an anonymous email account on a server in the USA. Then she put Master Persson out of her mind.
She spent the rest of the day going through Nobel Estates' listed properties. The most expensive one was a small palace outside Mariefred, where she had no desire to live. Out of sheer perversity she chose the next most expensive, a huge apartment just off Mosebacke Torg.
She scrutinized the photographs and floor plan, and in the end decided that it more than fulfilled her requirements.