The Billionaire
Mr. O. Knox, of New York, New York, was a multi-billionaire. His father, Mr. H. Knox, had made a fortune in the business of exterminating pests of all kinds.
Mr. H. Knox, a clever young man who knew very well on which side his bread was buttered, went to Japan and brought back kudzu sproutings; to Africa, from which he brought back several rare and resilient insects, including an especially tenacious kind of termite; to Iceland, where he retrieved flies; to India, where he discovered, all on his own, a new species of jungle-dwelling rodent which multiplied at an unbelievable rate; and lastly to the obscurer parts of America, on which journey he collected various types of ragweeds, hay seeds, cockroaches, mice, ants, and mosses.
In his vocation as a reporter, he was sent all over the U.S. to the houses of all the most famous millionaires. He was a lousy reporter, but he would have made a pretty fair intelligence man; in the dead of night, and sometimes in the brazen light of day, he released seeds, eggs, and pregnant animal mothers into the grounds and houses of these esteemed and wealthy personages, with the deftness of a really good film spy dropping tiny microphones and hidden cameras around the offices of the Pentagon. When someone's house and gardens got overrun, he had an amazing knack of being in the neighbourhood and really very happy to assist with the unexpected plague. No one knew how he did it, but he had an effective pest-killer.
The secret was simple. Being a clever young man, he had also collected on one of his trips to India a particularly deadly kind of poison, and diluted and changed it into a nice, thick, filmy solution that could be sprayed in a squirt-bottle into corners and over plants. It killed the plants and nixed animals in a matter of hours. Of course, that included all plants and animals, and sometimes there were unfortunate casualties. Mr. H. Knox always had a standard warning with his product that told people to keep their pets and children away, and, well, if they ignored that warning, there wasn't anything he could do.
In a matter of years, with his usual rate encompassing about five figures, Mr. H. Knox was a very wealthy man. On one of his exterminating projects--an astonishingly nasty case of giant Tennessee cockroaches that nobody on the Idaho estate could understand--he met a beautiful daughter of his latest client, and married her without hesitation. She was named Rosenkohl Jones and had a tendency to sneeze too much, but her connections weren't shabby and her father liked the idea.
Rosenkohl Jones-Knox was fond of fake flowers. She perfumed them and decked the house with them, and Mr. H. Knox had to work very hard not to throw them out. He was saved only by his sense of humour, which had no objections to filling a couple of her flowerpots with the little pink carcasses of a failed species of mouse and protesting innocently that protein made a good compost. When Rosenkohl Jones-Knox pointed out that fake flowers didn't need compost, he sweetly pointed out that the scent and the admirably expensive make of the flowers had fooled him into thinking they were real.
She removed them in a week, but her new hobby was china knick-knacks, which poor clumsy Mr. H. Knox had a terrible tendency to bump over.
When at long last they had a son, he became the pride and joy of his parents. His father left everything to him in the will, and his mother insisted on enrolling him in the most prestigious preschool anywhere in America.
It was in preschool that the troubles of Mr. O. Knox, which were to haunt him for the rest of his life, first descended. On the first day of school, the beaming, blue-eyed, four-year-old boy, with beautiful black curls and an adorable pudgy face, stood before the front of the class and was introduced, very solemnly, as Master Opportunity Knox. No sooner had the teacher announced his name to her room of innocents then she burst into a fit of giggles and had to sit down with her face in her arms and drink a glass of water before she could calm herself.
It was this sign of disrespect, coming from his very first teacher, which earned Mr. O. Knox the derision and scorn of his classmates. From that day forward, he was friendless.
The thoughtless cherub of four years quickly grew into a jaded, sulking fourteen-year-old, who wore ties and suits in school, passed silently through the halls, and had scheduled sessions with an expensive professional counsellor twice a day during which four hours he told her absolutely nothing. Unlike other such children, he had no secret delight, were it rebellious heavy metal bands, long, ponderous books, or experiments with dangerous drugs. Mr. O. Knox simply hated everyone and everything, and everyone and everything obligingly hated him just as much.
On one memorable occasion, the ninth anniversary of his birthday, he handed out gilt-edged invitations to his fellow fellows, and spent the day anticipating a rush, when school was out, of excited little boys all wanting to know what kinds of video games they would play and what flavour the ice cream would be. At the end of the day, there was no reply whatsoever. There was no jeering; not a single insult or expression of cruel amusement. There was simply no acknowledgement that young Mr. O. Knox had ever offered anyone to come and celebrate his ninth tortured year upon the heartless earth. Of course that meant that there was more of the ice cream (pistachio-mint) for himself, but this was cold comfort.
Mr. O. Knox passed through high school and college as an angry shadow, ignoring and being ignored, an outcast, owing all his misery to his exceedingly wealthy family. To have a ridiculous name might have been permissible among his peers; to be rich as Croesus someday was not. When he left the hallowed halls of the University, Mr. O. Knox would be jobless, having no need to work. He had learned his lessons purely because he had nothing else to do. He could have become a brain surgeon, as that was what he had studied for, but his hatred of his fellow man was too deep; and besides, he didn't need to.
Thus, at twenty-six, he was sitting in a large leather armchair with a built-in air conditioner, quietly drinking a glass of 1961 Richebourg Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. He was quite alone. He had never married, and his father and mother were dead; a freak accident involving a loose rodent and several spray-bottles of Mr. H. Knox's amazing extermination solution had despatched them with faultless precision. Mr. O. Knox was unbelievably wealthy, and unbelievably bored. He had no friends to invite for a game of 'tennis' (better known as 'lie about in tennis whites and sip drinks while commenting on the regretful and probably imagined darkness of the sky'; a very popular game) or for a fancy banquet dinner prepared by his superb Asian chef. There were no famous touring singers to whom he could extend cryptic invitations for private concerts, cultivating an unmistakable air of being ready to send a demo tape to one of his high-up connections in the musical industry, only to end the evening and never contact the hapless musician again (Mr. O. Knox was actually rather fond of this diversion). There were no long-time family-owned small businesses to buy out. There were no land-preserve oil-drilling endeavours to fund.
Yes, Mr. O. Knox was unbelievably bored. He yawned, an attractive yawn, closing his blue eyes and leaning back his head of black curls.
Then, suddenly, it came to him. He leaned forward and opened his eyes. He snapped open the expensive laptop computer. He clicked open the screen and betook himself to ebay.com. He had gone once or twice at other times, to purchase undesirable and unpleasant objects for charity auctions.
His lithe fingers clattered softly on the keyboard. His dexterous thumb manoeuvred the mouse. In a matter of seconds he had opened to a fierce competition over an antique clock. Seven-thousand, two hundred, and fifty-nine dollars. Ten minutes left. Forty bids. The last eighteen or so were all between only two different people, fervently raising their bids all the time. Mr. O. Knox refreshed the page, and observed that the bids had gone up to forty-three. A small smile hovered on his lips. He refreshed again. Forty-four.
The minutes passed. Five left, three left. Sixty-one bids. Eight-thousand, six hundred, and thirteen dollars. Two minutes left. Sixty-seven bids. Nine-thousand, seventy-three dollars. One minute. Thirty seconds. Eighty-one bids. Fifteen seconds. Eighty-two.
Mr. O. Knox clicked neatly. His fingers clattered again.
Click. Click.
The clock was sold. Ten-thousand dollars. Eighty-three bids.
But it was a curious thing. The last bid had not been placed by either of the two fevered competitors. It had been placed by someone else entirely. The user ID read 'badopportunity666'.
Mr. O. Knox leaned back in his leather chair and felt the delicious coolness of the air conditioning. He sipped his wine. On his face was a grim smile.
After that day, Mr. O. Knox was a frequent visitor to ebay.com. He was very prompt with payment and the persons from whom he purchased could only recommend him. He would buy anything, too--as long as there was a battle raging. He was a very patient man, after all. He could wait for an hour over an object to make sure that he took it at precisely the last moment, and he had a knack for finding the things with the most heated contests. All the time he sat there, patiently refreshing, clicking, typing with those soft clattering fingers, he smiled his grim little smile.
He sipped 1999 Grands-Echézeaux and 1961 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti La Tache as he worked. He bought ugly paintings and useless collectibles, lumpy furniture and bizarrely unnecessary products. In one of the giant storerooms on his estate, he hid the things, piles of worthless junk that people wanted.
He read in the papers a series of articles on the strange ebay bidder who was taking everything at the last moment. America was strikingly concerned with it; there were far too many articles and publicity for something so trivial, he reflected aloud to his valet. People didn't need the sort of thing that this person bought, anyway.
In between reading the paper and using the laptop, Mr. O. Knox contemplated his will. He wanted it very exact, and it took much meditation to put everything down perfectly. He slept better than he ever had, and was very satisfied with the wholesome activity he had been doing so much of lately.
When Mr. O. Knox died at the age of one-hundred and three, there was an enormous stir. The Mystery Bidder, as the papers had dubbed him, had long ago become one of the great unsolved puzzles of the twenty-first century and people thought about it, but only occasionally. However, Mr. O. Knox, the multi-billionaire, was a different matter entirely. He deserved consideration.
This was especially true when the stipulations of his will were taken into consideration. For example, he had left three-hundred horrible pictures to the ---- Art Museum, with the condition that in accepting them, the Museum received five million dollars, but if if tried to resell the worthless objects, this gift of money would be taken away. Then, of course, there was the struggling Orphanage of ----, to which he had left a plethora of horrible, cheap, obscene toys and required that they be kept if the Orphanage was to receive some ninety thousand dollars. The President of the United States was left the gift of eight-hundred and twenty-six priceless antique china pig figurines, which it was stated he would lose if he attempted to sell or auction off.
Apart from the money which he had saved to provide the necessary funds for which some twenty famous institutes would trade their dignity, Mr. O. Knox died penniless. He had spent everything he owned on ebay.com. His few living relatives, from the estate in Idaho belonging to his grandfather, were forced to go bankrupt in order to pay off his debts and the enormous mansion he had lived in for so long.
The obituary in the Times was of record length. The Mystery Bidder, Mr. O. Knox, the same person! In the end, the article finished, no one will ever know what drove this strange, cruel man.
Mr. O. Knox, sitting quiet with a glass of 1948 Petrus, could have laughed derisively and told them in the plainest words. But he didn't; he had been residing in a large and incalculably expensive coffin beneath the earth and a giant marble monument for several days. Instead, he left the New York Times fifty cases of rare old printing type that had been much coveted by a desperate old historian from France, with the note that if they attempted to place the priceless white elephant on the market, they would find themselves less the fifty cases, which would be ceremoniously dropped off the top of the Empire State Building.
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