Nick
The house is quiet.
I make the first call at one-seventeen in the morning.
Anatoly Ivanov picks up on the second ring because he's a lawyer who bills four figures an hour and men who bill that kind of money don't sleep through calls from men like me.
"Stepan?" he asks.
"Gone. An hour ago."
A pause. A lamp clicking on, a woman's voice in the background, the creak of a man getting out of bed.
"I'm sorry, Nikolai."
"Thank you. I need the will executed as written. Filed before nine tomorrow morning. Trust transfers, property holdings, business accounts. All of it. I don't want Viktor's lawyers near a courthouse before mine."
"Understood." A drawer opening. Pen on paper. "What about the board?"
"I'll call them at seven. Not before. I want ink on paper before Viktor starts making his own calls."
"The funeral?"
"Orthodox. Full rite. I'm calling Father Konstantin next."
"Nikolai." Ivanov's voice drops. Not the lawyer now. The voice of a man who has known my family for twenty years. "Your father was very clear in his instructions. The will is ironclad. Viktor can contest it, but he'll lose, and he'll lose publicly. If he's smart, he won't even try."
"He isn't smart. He's patient. That's what concerns me."
"Fair enough." More scratching. "I'll have my team at the courthouse when the doors open. Confirmation by nine-fifteen."
I hang up.
Father Konstantin is eighty-one years old and has been the spiritual advisor to the Zhirinovsky family since before I was born. He answers his phone the way all very old priests answer their phones, slowly, with a greeting that sounds as resigned as it does hopeful.
"It's Nikolai, Father." I cover the break in my voice by clearing my throat.
"Ah." A long breath. "Stepan."
"Yes."
He is quiet for a moment. I hear him praying under his breath, the words soft and practiced, and I let him finish because my father would have wanted it.
"When?" he asks.
"Around an hour ago."
"The Lord receives him." Another breath. "The vigil. You will want it done properly."
"Everything properly, Father. The washing. The vigil. The parastas. Full liturgy. I want his body prepared by someone from the church, the casket open for three days before burial."
"Of course." His voice steadies. This is work he knows. "I will come to the house tomorrow to begin. The washing should be done before the body is moved. Traditionally, the women of the family—"
"There are no women of the family, Father. My mother is gone. There's Lucia, his nurse. She cared for him well."
"Then Lucia and I will prepare him. Can you have candles? Beeswax, if possible. And the icon, the one your mother kept."
"It's in the cabinet in the front hall. I'll have Lucia stay."
"Good. I will be there by eight." He pauses, taking a rickety breath that has me wondering if calling him at this hour was right. "Nikolai."
"Yes, Father."
"Your father loved you very much. He told me so, many times, in confession. He said you were the only thing he made that he was proud of."
I press the phone against my ear hard enough that it hurts. I swallow twice before I trust my voice.
"Thank you, Father."
I hang up.
I sit in the chair beside my father and put my hand back on his. The cold doesn't bother me anymore. I've spent enough time with it now that it feels normal, the way all terrible things feel normal once you've been inside them long enough.
I call the funeral home. A family firm, three generations of Zhirinovsky burials. The woman on the after-hours line knows who I am before I give my name. I tell her the body will be ready for collection after Father Konstantin has done the washing.
I call his accountant. His banker. The three captains who didn't leave tonight, and I tell each of them the same thing in the same voice. Stepan is gone. The chair is mine. There will be a meeting at seven. Attendance is not optional.
Two of them say "Yes, Pakhan" without hesitation. The third pauses just long enough for me to make a note of it.
Between calls, I sit with him.
I look at his face. It's strange how fast a face stops being a face.
The nose I inherited, the jaw I didn't, the deep lines around his mouth from decades of holding his expression in check.
All of it still there. But the thing that made it his, the animating current that turned bone and skin into a person, that's gone.
What's left is a photograph of my father. Accurate but empty.
I think about Sadie.
Every time I sit still for more than a minute, she comes back. Her mouth on my throat in her small apartment. The sound she made when I rolled her on top of me. Her hair falling over one shoulder in the lamplight.
I want to go to her. It sits in my chest like a second heartbeat, and every time it pulses, I put my hand flat on my thigh and push down, grounding myself in the chair, in this room, in my duty.
I owe my father this night.
The calls and the candles and the quiet hours before dawn.
The vigil. He sat with my mother for two days after she died, in a chair just like this one, and he didn't leave the room until the funeral home came.
I was fourteen. I brought him water he didn't drink, toast he didn't eat, and I remember the way he looked at me when I finally sat on the floor beside his chair and stayed.
"You're a good boy, Kolya," he'd said.
I wasn't. I was a boy who had already killed a man by then, whose hands shook for a week after, whose father taught him to breathe through it. But I stayed. And I'm staying now.
The hours move slowly, then all at once, then slowly again.
The lamp burns. Lucia brings coffee at four and again at five, and she doesn't speak either time and I'm grateful for it.
At some point I hear Dmitri on the stairs, low voices in the hall, the front door opening and closing as the shift changes.
I check my phone at six. The feed from Sadie's building is live. The lobby camera shows Lev and Pasha in chairs near the mailboxes. Pasha has a newspaper. Lev has coffee. The hallway camera on the fourth floor shows nothing. Her door is closed. No movement.
She's sleeping.
Good. She should sleep. She had a long day and a longer night, and I left her alone in an apartment I wish I could have stayed in. I'll make it right when I get back to her. Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.
I close my phone.
I sit with my father for the last quiet stretch.
Gray light creeps through the curtains.
"I found her, Papa," I say. My voice is rough from the calls and the coffee and the hours of not using it for anything that mattered. "She's something. Small and sharp and she doesn't flinch. You would have liked her. Mama would have liked her."
I press my thumb across his knuckles.
"I'll keep her safe. Whatever Viktor does, wherever he goes, I'll keep her far enough from it that she never has to know what it costs."
I sit back.
"Goodbye, Papa." I kiss his forehead one last time, and leave to meet the captains.
The library smells like leather and pipe tobacco and the particular mustiness of old books that nobody has read in thirty years but nobody is allowed to throw away.
I stand at the head of the table my father had installed in here when I was nine, the one he used for meetings instead of the dining room because he said a man should never discuss business where his family eats.
Ivanov enters first. He's my father's lawyer, sixty-four, wire-framed glasses, the kind of man who has spent four decades making dangerous things look legal on paper.
He takes the seat to my right without being told, opens his briefcase, and lays three folders on the table in front of him.
He doesn't make eye contact. He doesn't need to.
Ivanov is on whatever side the documents say he's on, and the documents say he's on mine.
Gregor comes next. Captain of the port operation, my father's longest-serving man.
He's fifty-one, bald, built like a bull that gave up running and decided to stand in one place and dare things to come at him.
He sits at the far end of the table, folds his arms, and looks at me with the expression of a man who has already decided but wants to see how the room plays out before he says anything.
Then Yevgeny, who runs the construction fronts, Alexei, who handles distribution, and finally, my Uncle, Viktor.
"Gentlemen," I say. "My father died yesterday morning.
" I keep my voice level. Unhurried. I learned this from him, the way a room responds to a man who doesn't rush.
"He was sixty-six years old. He led this family for thirty-one years.
He built what you are all sitting inside of right now.
The funeral will be Thursday at Holy Trinity, and every man in this room will be there. "
The men nod. Alexei crosses himself.
"Before his death, my father made his wishes clear. Ivanov."
Ivanov opens the first folder. He passes copies down both sides of the table, a single page, notarized, bearing my father's signature and the signatures of two witnesses. I've read it four times already. The language is plain.
"Succession," Ivanov says, adjusting his glasses.
"Stepan Ivanovich Zhirinovsky designated his son, Nikolai Stepanovich Zhirinovsky, as sole heir to the position of Pakhan, to all operational authority, all financial holdings, and all obligations therein.
Witnessed and filed in accordance with the charter of this organization. "
The room is quiet.
Then Viktor clears his throat. "May I speak?"
I nod my ascent.
He stands from his chair and walks to the far end of the room, hands clasped in front of him, the positioning deliberate. He wants every man in the room to see two Zhirinovskys standing at opposite ends of the same table.
"My brother," Viktor begins, "was a great man. A visionary. He built this family from the ground up, and every person in this room owes him a debt that cannot be repaid."
He pauses. Lets the sentiment land.