Free "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me by Eva Gabrielsson Page A

spectacular view over the Riddarfjärden, a bay of Lake Mälaren in central Stockholm, but it was too luxurious for Mikael, who could not have afforded to buy anything there. We next seriously considered what looked to us like the ideal apartment building, with a small view of the bay, but it didn’t have enough exits to support the moment in the trilogy when three different groups can all keep Blomkvist under surveillance at the same time. Stieg was disappointed about that, but I told him it wasn’t important: “We’ll put an imaginary door there”—I pointed to the place—“and give the building a fictitious number. That way, the address will fit the plot.”
    Stieg’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s what we’ll do!” But somehow that made-up number disappeared in the published version of the surveillance episode, which takes place inthe third volume—and Stieg never had time to review any proofs except those for the first book.
    At the beginning of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, Mikael Blomkvist tells how he renovated his apartment himself and hid the worst patches of wall behind two watercolors by Emanuel Bernstone. I’ve always been very fond of that artist’s oeuvre, and at a time when he was completely unknown I bought one of his works, a picture of a red-tailed bird, with my small inheritance from my grandmother. And I was able to buy the second painting, a seagull, with the money left to me by my mother. Both watercolors are strong yet delicate “portraits” of shorebirds, and they have a great serenity. They still hang in the home I shared with Stieg.
    For my book on Hallman, I had a lengthy interview with his daughter, who was ninety-six years old at the time. She told me that her father had often gone sailing with Anders Zorn, one of Sweden’s foremost painters, and Albert Engström, a prominent Swedish cartoonist and humor writer. The three of them used to drink so much beer that the wharf in front of Hallman’s summer home on Skarpö island became littered with empties, and the ferry had trouble unloading its passengers—an anecdote that found its way into the first volume of the trilogy, when Fredrik Vanger and his wife Ulrika go boating with the two artists.
    Stieg was so enthusiastic about my Hallman book that he kept telling me confidently, “You’ll see, this book is going to change your life.” The irony is that it wasn’t my book that turned my life upside down, but
The Millennium Trilogy
.
    When Lisbeth Salander returns from Grenada at the beginning of the second novel and looks for an apartment, she has plenty of money but still has trouble finding what she wants. Stieg also spent some time looking for that apartment. Actually, I was the one who found it … in my research files. At the time I was working at Skanska, the largest construction company in Sweden, so I was naturally interested in everything that concerned the firm. I gathered information about both its construction activities and its chairman of the board, Percy Barnevik, whose enormous pension payouts, accumulated thanks to all of the top executive positions he’d held during his career, had been made public in the media—a revelation I found worrisome both as a citizen and as a salaried employee. When Barnevik sold his apartment on Fiskargatan, I’d filed away a relevant newspaper article that included a floor plan of the place. That’s how Lisbeth moved into her lovely apartment on Fiskargatan, near Mosebacke, an area with many cultural venues in the upscale Södermalm district.
    Actually, so many of Stieg’s characters live and work in Södermalm that this large island, one of the most densely populated districts of the capital, becomes a character in its own right, a part of central Stockholm that is also central to the plot of
The Millennium Trilogy
. Connected on its northern rim to Gamla Stan (the Old Town) by Slussen, a transportation grid with a lock between the Baltic Sea and Lake Mälaren,