Chapter 2 Summary
Friday, December 17
Advokat Nils Erik Bjurman is thinking about Lisbeth Salander, as he often does, and he is angry. The young girl “crushed him”; he will never forget—or forgive. She abused him in his own home and then humiliated him by tattooing his entire chest with damning words: “I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST.”
The fifty-five-year-old lawyer knows what he did to Salander was wrong by anyone’s standards, and as he is her guardian, it was reprehensible. He had been tormented by thoughts of her since he had met her two years earlier. When the waiflike girl in her mid-twenties had been deemed legally incompetent by the courts, he had assumed complete control over her life. The power had been intoxicating. Her files said she was promiscuous and may even have solicited sex from an older man in a public park. She was no innocent, thought Bjurman; she was the “ideal plaything—grown-up, promiscuous, socially incompetent, and at his mercy.”
Salander was the only client he had ever exploited. He had tried to dominate his wife and various prostitutes to meet his sexual needs, but when they could not satisfy him, he had victimized Salander. Suddenly, though, she destroyed him. She videotaped the violent rape and her near-murder by asphyxiation and used the tape to blackmail him; she forced him to write reports to the courts attesting to her competency, with the eventual goal of Salander's being declared competent.
For months Bjurman was virtually paralyzed, unable to work or conduct any business. He removed the mirror from his bathroom because he was traumatized by the sight of the tattoo. When he finally returned to his office, he transferred his cases to his colleagues; now his only active client is Salander. Acquiescing to her demands, Bjurman sends positive reports about her to the courts. Not a word of them is true, but he has no choice.
Bjurman goes to France and consults a cosmetic surgeon about removing the tattoo. He is dismayed to learn that he will need time-consuming and expensive skin grafts. He did not see Salander after she took over his life, until the night he wakes up to find her at the foot of his bed. She apologizes for waking him and tells him she will be out of town for some time. He is to continue writing his reports, sending copies to her via e-mail. When he begs her forgiveness, she tells him he will be free when she is declared legally competent—and if he begins the tattoo removal procedure in France before then, she will tattoo his forehead. Bjurman loathes her even more, imagining how he will strangle her. Oddly, this obsession with Salander’s death serves to create a “surprising emotional balance” in his life. Now he focuses not on wanting to kill her but on how he will do it.
Mikael Blomkvist walks past Bjurman in a local café, but neither he nor his companion, Erika Berger, notices him; they don't know who Bjurman is. Blomkvist tells Berger (his longtime friend, lover, and editor) that their newest intern is enamored of him; Berger must talk to the intern, he says, since she is the daughter of Berger’s friend. Blomkvist has an unjustified reputation for being sexually promiscuous, but Berger agrees to talk to the aggressive woman.
Bjurman has access to every document of Salander’s life: medical records, welfare reports, and psychiatric assessments. It takes him months to re-create her life; ironically, every agency offers help and even applauds him for taking such an interest in his client. He discovers the original notebooks of...
(This entire section contains 956 words.)
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his predecessor, Holger Palmgren, which detail Salander's life from the time she was an unruly teenager through the time she worked as a researcher for Dragan Armansky, CEO of Milton Security. Now Bjurman knows how she was able to discover so much about him. He decides to keep the documents at his summer cabin, since she has a key to his apartment and has been there without his knowing it. He believes Salander lacks social inhibitions, as the reports indicate, and that she is a “sick, murderous…person.”
Palmgren’s official reports are annotated with his personal observations of Salander made over many years; in these notes, Bjurman finds continual references to an event called All the Evil. Other discoveries include a twin sister no longer mentioned anywhere, a mother deemed incapable of taking care of her, an absent father, some trauma at age twelve or thirteen which changed the course of Salander's life, and mention of a top secret file closed by “Order of His Royal Highness.” (Later requests for the file had been denied.) Palmgren had become Salander’s trustee when she was thirteen, acting in that role until becoming her guardian when she reached eighteen. They obviously had discussed All the Evil, but Palmgren had written no specific notes about it before suffering the stroke which had necessitated Bjurman's becoming Salander's guardian.
More research reveals that Camilla Salander, the twin, had been placed in a foster home, while Lisbeth had been placed in a children’s psychiatric clinic. A reference to a police report for an incident on 3/12/91 shocks Bjurman. Because he knows the police officer who had been involved, Bjurman is able to get the forty-seven page report, plus pictures and notes for the following six years. Based on this report, Bjurman now has an unlikely ally.
At the café, a giant blond man approaches Bjurman and says he has been sent to meet with him. Bjurman is disappointed at having to do business with a messenger, but he has no option when recruiting allies who have a grudge against Salander.
