I really wish I could’ve been there to see von Oehson’s face at the exact moment he found out.
Instead I had to make do with trying to picture it, although admittedly that was still pretty damn good. I even mentally opened the window in our living room at one point, sticking my ear out into the cold, to see if maybe, just maybe, I could hear von Oehson cursing my name at the top of his lungs from his palace apartment in the sky on billionaires’ row.
Of course, the real question wasn’t whether he would throw a tantrum and curse my name. It was what, if anything, he would do next. My money was on his doing nothing—except smile for the cameras. That was what I envisioned, what he’d ultimately decide. In his otherwise lightning-fast mind, there would be a slow reckoning, that as far as a price to pay for all his crimes and misdemeanors he was getting off on the cheap side.
Of course, for a man worth twenty-four billion dollars, cheap is a relative term.
That next morning, Mathias von Oehson woke up to learn, courtesy of the New York Gazette, that he had donated two billion dollars to the city of New York to fund a new prekindergarten education program for low-income families in all five boroughs. Furthermore, this wasn’t one of those spread-out-over-ten-years donations. This was two billion—the whole enchilada—already paid in full to the city to fast-track major construction and massive hiring at the start of the new year.
That was another moment I would’ve liked to have seen in person. Von Oehson, in full panic mode, checking the balance of his numerous bank accounts, most of them offshore, that were indeed a total of two billion dollars less than they were the day before. Funny thing about those wiring instructions he used to steal the money from the Hungarians. Turned out they also worked in reverse. All it took was some tinkering from Julian, along with the proper routing numbers for the city of New York coffers, courtesy of Mayor Deacon.
How did we settle on two billion as the amount? I figured one billion for each week’s notice von Oehson initially gave Harlem Legal House to vacate their offices when he leveraged me into working for him. Yeah, that felt about right.
“It is my distinct honor to be awarding Mathias von Oehson a key to the city this Friday, a city that he has so greatly enhanced for generations to come, thanks to his phenomenally generous donation,” said Deacon, as quoted in the article. This was according to the press release, “a copy of which the New York Gazette has obtained in advance.”
Within an hour after the news broke, the mayor took to Twitter to further codify the transaction. “A gift to more than a million children has been placed under the city’s tree,” he wrote, before adding that it was his honor to work personally with von Oehson on the arrangement. Politicians never miss an opportunity to get in a plug for themselves.
All the better, though, to further leverage von Oehson. What was he going to do, ask for the money back? Claim that there’d been some kind of mistake?
No, not a chance. While two billion was a ton of money, his reputation would always be worth more. Lest there be any doubt, his two-word text to me that same afternoon summed it all up.
Well played.
A von Oehson man always knows when to cut his losses.
Who knows? Maybe he’ll even hang that key to the city on his wall.
For everything that’s ever been written about the idea of justice, its meaning will never be something that you can fully understand through words alone. Its full definition will always be something you feel. In your head. In your heart. In your gut.
My gut was telling me that justice had been served.
Not perfectly. Not permanently. But still just enough to feel it.
I’d been played, manipulated, and, for a good stretch, outmatched. There aren’t that many dumb billionaires in the world. Yet, in the words of the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus—and at the risk of a serious eye roll from Elizabeth for quoting a famous dead guy—It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
In short, von Oehson had his masterpiece.
In the end, I had mine.