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doesn’t sound like a gigantic investment.”
    “I ran the numbers. The total rent must have been around 15,000 kronor for two years. Wages may have amounted to 150,000 SEK at most—and I’m being generous here. Cost of machines and cost of freight … a van to deliver the egg cartons … I’m guessing 250,000. Add fees for permits, a little travelling back and forth—apparently one person from Sweden did visit the site a few times. It looks as though the whole operation ran for under two million. One day in the summer of 1993 the foreman came down to the factory and said it was shut down, and a while later aHungarian lorry appeared and carried off the machinery. Bye-bye, Minos.”
    In the course of the trial Blomkvist had often thought of that Midsummer Eve. For large parts of the evening the tone of the conversation made it feel as if they were back at school, having a friendly argument. As teenagers they had shared the burdens common to that stage in life. As grown-ups they were effectively strangers, by now quite different sorts of people. During their talk Blomkvist had thought that he really could not recall what it was that had made them such friends at school. He remembered Lindberg as a reserved boy, incredibly shy with girls. As an adult he was a successful … well, climber in the banking world.
    He rarely got drunk, but that chance meeting had transformed a disastrous sailing trip into a pleasant evening. And because the conversation had so much an echo of a schoolboy tone, he did not at first take Lindberg’s story about Wennerström seriously. Gradually his professional instincts were aroused. Eventually he was listening attentively, and the logical objections surfaced.
    “Wait a second,” he said. “Wennerström is a top name among market speculators. He’s made himself a billion, has he not?”
    “The Wennerström Group is sitting on somewhere close to two hundred billion. You’re going to ask why a billionaire should go to the trouble of swindling a trifling fifty million.”
    “Well, put it this way: why would he risk his own and his company’s good name on such a blatant swindle?”
    “It wasn’t so obviously a swindle given that the AIA board, the bankers, the government, and Parliament’s auditors all approved Wennerström’s accounting without a single dissenting vote.”
    “It’s still a ridiculously small sum for so vast a risk.”
    “Certainly. But just think: the Wennerström Group is an investment company that deals with property, securities, options, foreign exchange … you name it. Wennerström contacted AIA in 1992 just as the bottom was about to drop out of the market. Do you remember the autumn of 1992?”
    “Do I? I had a variable-rate mortgage on my apartment when the interest rate shot up five hundred percent in October. I was stuck with nineteen percent interest for a year.”
    “Those were indeed the days,” Lindberg said. “I lost a bundle that year myself. And Hans-Erik Wennerström—like every other player in the market—was wrestling with the same problem.The company had billions tied up in paper of various types, but not so much cash. All of a sudden they could no longer borrow any amount they liked. The usual thing in such a situation is to unload a few properties and lick your wounds, but in 1992 nobody wanted to buy real estate.”
    “Cash-flow problems.”
    “Exactly. And Wennerström wasn’t the only one. Every businessman …”
    “Don’t say businessman. Call them what you like, but calling them businessmen is an insult to a serious profession.”
    “All right, every speculator had cash-flow problems. Look at it this way: Wennerström got sixty million kronor. He paid back six mil, but only after three years. The real cost of Minos didn’t come to more than two million. The interest alone on sixty million for three years, that’s quite a bit. Depending on how he invested the money, he might have doubled the AIA money, or maybe grown it ten