  Page 5 of 6  'Expo" was bad for his health. The office was a
haze of smoke, the tables littered with cigarette stubs floating
in half-full coffee mugs and mayonnaise-smeared sandwich
wrappers from fast-food joints. (Larsson's dinner of choice was
a McFeast & Co., the Swedish equivalent of a Quarter Pounder
value meal — only instead of a Coke he ordered whole milk.) He
was in the office every night after leaving TT, and all weekend.
He drank obscene quantities of cheap coffee and suffered from
insomnia. He begged friends for funding, conducted research and
trained his young staff, some of whom he had recruited as
teenagers. The kids adored him; he handed out his e-mail address
freely, and responded to anyone who wrote to him, often at
startling length. "He was the great old man who knew
everything," says Mikael Ekman, who went to work at Expo when he
was 19.  The staff loved listening to Larsson's stories. A few
times, he talked about a girl who had been gang-raped by
teenagers in the woods outside of Umeå w