WHEN HE began writing for Searchlight and its antifascist agenda, Stieg, too, became a hated enemy of the far right. In the spring of 1991, he published Extremhögern (Right-Wing Extremism) with Anna-Lena Lodenius. The book provided an overview of all the groups and parties at that end of the political spectrum, covering the origins of their movements, their use of violence, and their current affiliated organizations in Europe, Scandinavia, and the United States. It was the first comprehensive work ever published on the subject. One of the groups mentioned in the book, VAM (Vitt Ariskt Motstand, for White Aryan Resistance), published a magazine called Storm that was steeped in racial violence dressed up in a romantic aura. Seven of its members had amassed a total of twenty convictions among them for crimes such as armed robbery, stealing weapons from military depots, and homicide, so when we learned the following year that Storm knew both our address and that of Anna-Lena, we were worried: having your name on neo-Nazi hit lists can be very dangerous.
While we were trying to figure out how to react and protect ourselves, my sister’s companion at the time told us, “You’re part of the family. I’ll go see my uncle, an Italian; he’s connected, he’ll come up with a definitive solution for you.” At first we were delighted with the offer, especially with its suggestion of an “extended family.” Then we had second thoughts. We knew perfectly well there’d be no question of money changing hands, and that one day we’d be expected to repay a debt of honor. But what form would it take? Besides, finding criminals was the job of the police. So we declined the invitation, explaining that we preferred to let the law take its course. I admit, though, that I thought about that idea for some time. In 1993, Storm published photos of Stieg and Anna-Lena along with their social security and phone numbers, plus their personal and business addresses. Referring to Stieg, the accompanying text concluded: “Never forget his words, his face, and his address. Should he be allowed to continue his work—or should he be dealt with?”
In those days, anyone could obtain pictures of any Swedish citizen by going to the passport service of the Swedish police. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander explains how simple it is to do so: “If the person is in a database, which is absolutely the case for everyone, the target swiftly winds up in the spider’s web.” In the next book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, Lisbeth even hesitates to move to another apartment because that would mean a new address and would make her “someone concretely present in all sorts of computer files.” Stieg knew everything there was to know about tracking people, all the methods used by journalists, by the police, by men hunting for the wives who’d left them after conjugal violence, and as it happens—by extremists and criminal gangs. Because of the threats from Storm, the magazine was prosecuted and convicted. But that took time.…
In the 1990s, more than a dozen people were murdered in Sweden for political reasons by individuals involved with neo-Nazi groups. Säpo—the Security Service, an arm of the Swedish National Police—estimates that during 1998 alone, there were more than two thousand unprovoked racist attacks, more than half of which can be directly linked to neo-Nazi militants in White Power groups. And some of these extremists had managed to obtain our phone number, because although only my name appeared on our apartment door, and the telephone was listed under my name alone, we were receiving anonymous calls. Our apartment was already secured by an alarm system and a digicode keypad, but I had a new metal security door installed as well. After Mikael Blomkvist enters Lisbeth Salander’s swank new apartment at 9 Fiskargatan in the Mosebacke area of Södermalm, he stares in frustration at the alarm keypad by the front door. He knows that if he doesn’t tap in the correct four-digit code within thirty seconds, the alarm will go off and a bunch of beefy guys from a security company will arrive in no time. Stieg and I went through that experience many times when we’d come home exhausted only to find ourselves standing at our front door, powerless to stop the “screamer”—our pet name for the alarm.
Now and then Stieg would receive bullets in the mail, and once someone was waiting for him outside the entrance to the TT building. Warned in time, Stieg slipped out a back door. Our answering machine was set permanently on “Record” to keep evidence of the threats we received, and they were always in the same vein: “Piece of shit, you Jew-fucker.… Traitor, we’ll tear you apart … and we know where you live.…”
Swedish neo-Nazis have their own information network: the Anti-AFA (Anti-Anti-Fascist Action). In 1994, after the complaint lodged against Storm, the police seized a list of over two hundred antiracist activists. A few years later, extremists targeted Peter Karlsson and Katarina Larsson, two journalists at Aftonbladet—one of Sweden’s largest evening papers—who had once worked with us at Expo. At the time, they were investigating, among other things, the flourishing White Power music industry, which finances extremist groups throughout the world, and their efforts would later help lead to the bankruptcy of the racist Nordland music label in Sweden. Although they were allowed to officially conceal their identities in public records, their names, addresses, and detailed personal information about them were posted on the Internet in March 1999. Not long afterward, Aftonbladet published their reporters’ findings in an article revealing the names of neo-Nazis who had received training in weapons and explosives during their military service. Three months later, on June 28, Peter Karlsson and his eight-year-old son were the victims of a car bomb. When the little boy opened the car door, he was thrown back from the blast and only slightly injured, but his father sustained a serious spinal injury and remains severely handicapped.
On September 16 of that same year, trade unionist Björn Söderberg revealed that a neo-Nazi had been elected to the board of his local employees’ union. That same day and throughout the month of September, photos of more than twenty-five antiextremist activists, including that of Björn Söderberg, were requested from the passport services by the neo-Nazi newspaper Info 14. On October 12, Björn Söderberg was murdered, shot multiple times at his home in a Stockholm suburb. Among the possessions of one of the men implicated in his assassination, the police later found a list of more than a thousand names!
Events like these back up the threats directed at the magazine Millennium and underline the failings of the security measures provided by the state for any of the novel’s public citizens put at risk, failings that lead to the murders of Dag Svensson and Mia Bergman in The Girl Who Played with Fire. In fact, everything of this nature described in The Millennium Trilogy has happened at one time or another to a Swedish citizen, journalist, politician, public prosecutor, unionist, or policeman. Nothing was made up.
The culprits were quickly found and arrested on October 14, 1999. Shortly afterward, Stieg called one afternoon to tell me Peter Karlsson had just warned him that our passport photos, along with Söderberg’s, had been found among the evidence in the case, and that some of the suspects were still at large. Before hanging up, Stieg told me, “You mustn’t go home.” When the last member of the group was arrested on November 29, my friend Eleanor told me, relieved, “Now we can finally go out safely in public and stuff ourselves in a restaurant!”
Throughout that period, Stieg and I worried constantly about each other. Even before that, in a café I had always sat between him and the door as a kind of protective screen, but now we weren’t allowing ourselves to be seen together at all. My colleagues at work didn’t know the name of the man I lived with; I was always evasive, simply saying, “a journalist.” I never invited my coworkers home, only to public places. As for Stieg, without saying anything about it, he had set up a security network around me. This meant that if the police got a call reporting an incident on our street, they were authorized to send all available vehicles. I realized this the day there was a minor car accident outside our apartment and I heard so many sirens arrive that I went out on the balcony, saw only a fender bender, and thought, You’d think the cops had nothing better to do!
There wasn’t anything brave about living that way. We just did. We’d both chosen that. But it definitely had an effect on our lives. It was why—among other things—we’d never gotten married or had children.
It really was safer for Stieg to remain “single” in all official documents. True, his address was relatively easy to find, as I’ve explained, but since mine was the only name on our door and on all our bills, tracking down his exact whereabouts was more difficult.
In 1983, we had decided to get married. We bought rings in a store on Regeringsgatan—“Government Street”—and had them engraved with “Stieg and Eva.” We made an appointment with the minister of the parish of Spånga in northwest Stockholm to find out how long the necessary formalities would take, only to discover that getting married was more complicated and time-consuming than we’d thought. Once again, our professional obligations got in the way of our private lives, and neither one of us took the time to compile the required administrative dossier.
Then the United States invaded what we thought of as “our island,” Grenada. And we worked night and day to find out what had really happened there, so getting married was no longer our top priority. Besides, Stieg had just begun writing for Searchlight and started drawing too much interest from the extreme right to take any risks. Even though we weren’t married yet, we wore our rings; Stieg finally had to take his off when he gained weight in 1990, but it’s on his hand in many of my photographs from those days. As for me, I now wear Stieg’s ring as well as my own.
Erland, Stieg’s father, urged us several times to get married, especially at the end of the 1980s, when there was talk of eliminating the reversion of pensions on the death of a spouse if the marriage had not taken place before a certain date. Like many couples of our generation, however, we did not follow through. And with good reason, since we had to consider the very real problem of our personal safety.
I also think that our respective childhoods did not condition us to have a family. When I was a little girl, I believed my mother had abandoned me. The reality was much more complex than that, of course, but that event certainly contributed to my fear of having a child. We thought about having one, naturally, but—and I mean this without any “irony”—there was always something more urgent to take care of: we wanted our financial situation to be more stable, more promising, more secure—before taking such an important step.… And time passed.…
A few months before his death, Stieg talked again about getting married. Especially since we already had our rings! With the Millennium books about to be published, we knew that our personal finances would improve, and since Stieg had decided to work only part-time at Expo, he would be less at risk from right-wing retaliation.
This time, it was death that overshadowed our private lives.