“He pondered the wisdom of selling his apartment, though it would break his heart. At the end of the go-go eighties, during a period when he had a steady job and a pretty good salary, he had looked around for a permanent place to live. He ran from one apartment showing to another before he stumbled on an attic flat of 700 square feet right at the end of Bellmansgatan.
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The apartment had two dormer windows and a gable window with a view of the rooftops towards Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s oldest section, and the water of Riddarfjärden.
He had a glimpse of water by the Slussen locks and a view of City Hall. Today he would never be able to afford such an apartment, and he badly wanted to hold on to it.
But that he might lose the apartment was nothing beside the fact that professionally he had received a real smack in the nose. It would take a long time to repair the damage—if indeed it could ever be repaired. It was a matter of trust.
For the foreseeable future, editors would hesitate to publish a story under his byline. He still had plenty of friends in the business who would accept that he had fallen victim to bad luck and unusual circumstances, but he was never again going to be able to make the slightest mistake.
What hurt most was the humiliation. He had held all the trumps and yet he had lost to a semi-gangster in an Armani suit. A despicable stock-market speculat or. A yuppie with a celebrity lawyer who sneered his way through the whole trial.
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… How in God’s name had things gone so wrong?”
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Image Guide:
Bellmansgatan 1 is where Mikael Blomkvist lives in an attic apartment with a view of the water in the lochs and Gamla stan. The real entry is via a walkway over the street. On Mariaberget Hill, here, many of the buildings are from the 1700s, many built after a substantial fire in 1759 that destroyed many buildings. The architecture is eclectic with strikingly Gothic and neo-Gothic spires and castle-like structures. View location on map.
1) View over the Bellmansgatan street itself. No. 1 is the building on the corner.
2) Mid-air walkway in to Bellmansgatan 1. The real entry is via a walkway over the street. Blomkvist’s attic apartment is in the building next to the bridge. (Previous photo.)
All location images (c) by Kirsty Komuso @ Flickr. Creative Commons License.
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Excerpt from Stieg Larsson: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (c) Nordstedts Forlag and screen caps from the film of the same name. All for the pleasure of fans and with the intention of promoting the book and the film. (Please don’t sue me like Wennerström did Micke, okay?)
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More places to go
Have some ‘hot coffee’ with Miriam Wu in Tomtebogatan
Visit the Millennium offices in Götgatan
Investigate the Missing Maps from Tattoo
Drool at the Best Millennium Movie Photos
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