you as my friend, that I miss your company and would love to have a cup of coffee with you - if you felt like it.
I don't know what kind of a mess you've got yourself into, but the ruckus on Lundagatan was alarming. If you need help you can call me anytime. As you know, I am deeply in your debt.
Plus, I have your shoulder bag. When you want it back, just let me know. If you don't want to see me, just give me an address to mail it to. I promise not to bother you, since you've indicated clearly enough that you don't want anything to do with me.
Mikael
As anticipated he never heard a word from her.
When he had got home the morning after the attack on Lundagatan, he opened the shoulder bag and spread the contents on the kitchen table. There was a wallet with an ID card, about 600 kronor, 200 American dollars, and a monthly travel card. There was a pack of Marlboro Lights, three Bic lighters, a box of throat lozenges, a packet of tissues, a toothbrush, toothpaste, three tampons in a side pocket, an unopened pack of condoms with a price sticker that showed they were bought at Gatwick Airport in London, a bound notebook with stiff black A4 dividers, five ballpoint pens, a can of Mace, a small bag with makeup, an FM radio with an earphone but no batteries, and Saturday's Aftonbladet.
The most intriguing item was a hammer, easily accessible in an outside pocket. However, the attack had come so suddenly that she had not been able to make use of it or the Mace. She had evidently used her keys as brass knuckles - there were still traces of blood and skin on them.
Of the six keys on the ring, three of them were typical apartment keys-front door, apartment door, and the key to a padlock. But none of them fit the door of the building on Lundagatan.
Blomkvist opened the notebook and went through it page by page. He recognized Salander's neat hand and could see at once that this was not a girl's secret diary. Three-quarters of the pages were filled with what looked like mathematical notations. At the top of the first page was an equation that even Blomkvist recognized.
(x3 + y3 = z3)
Blomkvist had never had trouble doing calculations. He had left secondary school with the highest marks in math, which in no way meant, of course, that he was a mathematician, only that he had been able to absorb the content of the school's curriculum. But Salander's pages contained formulas of a type that Blomkvist neither understood nor could even begin to understand. One equation stretched across an entire double page and ended with things crossed out and changed. He could not even tell whether they were real mathematical formulas and calculations, but since he knew Salander's peculiarities he assumed that the equations were genuine and no doubt had some esoteric meaning.
He leafed back and forth for a long time. He might as well have come upon a notebook full of Chinese characters. But he grasped the essentials of what she was trying to do. She had become fascinated by Fermat's Last Theorem, a classic riddle. He let out a deep sigh.
The last page in the book contained some very brief and cryptic notes which had absolutely nothing to do with math, but nevertheless still looked like a formula:
(Blond Hulk + Magge) = NEB
They were underlined and circled and meant nothing to him. At the bottom of the page was a telephone number and the name of a car rental company in Eskilstuna, Auto-Expert.
Blomkvist made no attempt to interpret the notes. He stubbed out his cigarette and put on his jacket, set the alarm in the office, and walked to the terminal at Slussen, where he took the bus out to the yuppie reserve in Staket, near Lannersta Sound. He had been invited to dinner with his sister, Annika Blomkvist Giannini, who was turning forty-two.
Berger began her long Easter weekend with a furious and anxiety-filled two-mile jog that ended at the steamboat wharf in Saltsjobaden. She had been lazy about her hours at the gym and felt stiff and out of shape. She walked home. Her husband was giving a lecture at the Modern Museum and it would be at least 8:00 before he got home. Berger thought she would open a bottle of good wine, switch on the sauna, and seduce him. At least