a cup is going to break," Svensson said. "She takes it out only when we have really important guests."
Johansson smiled. "I spent several years with my grandmother when I was a child, and the china is almost all I have left of her."
"They're really beautiful," Eriksson said. "My kitchen is one hundred percent IKEA."
Blomkvist didn't give a damn about flowered coffee cups and instead cast an appraising eye on the plate with the cheesecake. He pondered letting his belt out a notch. Berger apparently shared his feelings.
"Good God, I should have said no to dessert too," she said, glancing ruefully at Eriksson before taking up her spoon with a firm grip.
It was supposed to be a simple working dinner, in part to cement the cooperation they had agreed on and in part to continue to discuss plans for the themed issue. Svensson had suggested that they meet at his place for a bite to eat, and Johansson had served the best sweet-and-sour chicken Blomkvist had ever tasted. Over dinner they put away two bottles of robust Spanish red, and Svensson asked if anyone would like a glass of Tullamore Dew with their dessert. Only Berger was foolish enough to decline, and Svensson got out the glasses.
It was a one-bedroom apartment in Enskede. Svensson and Johansson had been going out for a few years, but had taken the plunge and moved in together a year ago.
The group gathered at around 6:00 p.m., and by the time dessert was served at 8:30 not a word had been said about the ostensible reason for the dinner. But Blomkvist did discover that he liked his hosts and enjoyed their company.
It was Berger who finally steered the conversation to the topic they had all come to discuss. Johansson produced a printout of her thesis and placed it on the table in front of Berger. It had a surprisingly ironic title - "From Russia with Love" - an homage, of course, to Ian Fleming's classic novel. The subtitle was "Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Society's Response."
"You have to recognize the difference between my thesis and the book Dag is writing," she said. "Dag's book is a polemic aimed at the people who are making money from trafficking. My thesis is statistics, field studies, law texts, and a study of how society and the courts treat the victims."
"The girls, you mean."
"Young girls, usually fifteen to twenty years old, working class, poorly educated. They often have unstable home lives, and many of them are subjected to some form of abuse even in childhood. One reason they come to Sweden is that they have been fed a pack of lies."
"By the sex traders."
"In this sense there is a sort of gender perspective to my thesis. It's not often that a researcher can establish roles along gender lines so clearly. Girls - victims; boys - perpetrators. Apart from a handful of women working on their own who profit from the sex trade, there is no other form of criminality in which the sex roles themselves are a precondition for the crime. Nor is there any other form of criminality in which social acceptance is so great, or which society does so little to prevent."
"And yet Sweden does have tough laws against trafficking and the sex trade," Berger said. "Is that not the case?"
"Don't make me laugh. Several hundred girls - there are no published statistics, obviously - are transported to Sweden every year to work as prostitutes, which in this case means making their bodies available for systematic rape. After the law against trafficking went into effect, it was tested in the courts a few times. The first time was in April 2003, the case against that crazy brothel madam who had a sex change. And she was acquitted, of course."
"I thought she was convicted."
"Of running a brothel, yes. But she was acquitted of trafficking charges. The thing was, the girls who were the victims were also the witnesses against her, and they vanished back to the Baltics. Interpol tried to track them down, but after months of searching it was decided that they were not going to be found."
"What had become of them?"
"Nothing. The TV show Insider did a follow-up and went over to Tallinn. It took the reporters exactly one afternoon to find two of the girls, who were living with their parents. The third girl had moved to Italy."
"The police in Tallinn, in other words, weren't very effective."
"Since then we have actually won a couple of convictions, but