The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series Read Free Page B

took the name of a certain Italian fascist. These days she had a swastika tattooed on her throat, a crew cut and an unhealthy, pallid complexion. Yet she was by no means hideous to look at. She was built like a wrestler, but there was something graceful about her. Quite a few people were captivated by her imposing manner. Most were simply terrified.
    Benito had – so it was rumoured – murdered three people with a pair of daggers she called Keris, and there was so much talk about them that they became part of the menacing atmosphere in the unit. Everyone said the worst that could happen was for Benito to pronounce that she had her dagger pointed at you, because then you were sentenced to death, or already as good as dead. Most of that was bullshit, of course, but even though the knives were a safe distance from the prison, the myths surrounding them spread terror along the corridor. It was a disgrace, a major scandal. Olsen had, in effect, capitulated.
    He should have been well equipped to deal with her. He was one metre ninety-two tall, eighty-eight kilos and his body was fit and toned. As a teenager he had beaten up any bastard who tried to get at his mother. But he did have one weak point: he was a single father. A year ago Benito had come up to him in the prison garden and whispered a chillingly accurate description of every passageway and set of stairs Olsen would take each morning when he dropped his daughter in class 3A on the third floor of Fridhemsskolan in Örebro.
    “I’ve got my dagger pointed at your little girl,” she said. And that was all it took.
    Olsen lost his grip on the unit and the decay spread down the hierarchy. He did not doubt that some of his colleagues – that coward Fred Strömmer, for instance – had become downright corrupt. Things were never worse than now, during the summer, when the prison was full of incompetent, frightened temporary staff. Tension rose in the oxygen-starved corridors. Olsen lost count of the number of times he had vowed to restore order. Yet he succeeded in doing nothing at all. The situation was not helped by the fact that the prison governor Rikard Fager was an idiot. Fager cared only about the façade, which was still nice and shiny, however rotten the inside.
    Every afternoon Olsen succumbed to the paralysing effect of Benito’s eyes, and in keeping with the psychology of oppression he became weaker every time he backed down, as if the blood were being drained from him. Worst of all, he was unable to protect Faria.
    Faria had been sent to prison for killing her older brother, by pushing him through a large plate-glass window in the Stockholm suburb of Sickla. Yet there was no sign of anything aggressive or violent about her. Most of the time she sat in her cell and read or cried, and she was only in maximum security because she was both suicidal and under threat. She was a human wreck, abandoned by society. She had absolutely no swagger in the prison corridor, no steely look that would command respect, just a fragile beauty which drew the tormentors and sadists. Olsen loathed himself for not doing anything about it.
    The only constructive thing he had attempted lately was to connect with the new arrival, Lisbeth Salander. No small task. Salander was a tough bitch and there was just as much talk about her as there was about Benito. Some admired Salander, others thought she was an arrogant little shit, and others still worried about losing their place in the hierarchy. Every muscle in Benito’s body was spoiling for a fight, and Olsen had no doubt she was collecting information on Salander through her contacts outside the prison walls, just as she had done on him and on everybody else of interest to her in the unit.
    But so far nothing had happened, not even when Salander had been given permission, despite her high-security classification, to work in the garden and the ceramic workshop. Her ceramic vases were the worst he had ever seen. She was not exactly