Sleuth
About six feet tall, my lanky customer from Washington, DC had come to
Danville to visit his parents. Other than that, he’d only told me he needed a few
business suits.
“What kind of business?” I asked, knowing that would help me
find a suit to match his needs.
As he answered, he handed me his card. “I’ve had a
successful detective agency for more than 20 years.”
“How many suits do you need?” I asked.
“Two,” he answered.
“How would you like to trade for a little detective work?”
“Sure,” he replied. “What do you need me to do?”
We sat down, so that I could detail my history with Dr.
Phenius Vincent Buyck, an extraordinary physician whose ancestors were American
Indians, Africans, and Dutch. Before he was ten, he’d begun his study of herbal
remedies with his grandfather, a Blackfoot Indian root doctor. Less than a year
later, he had a little hospital where he attended to sick animals. Much later,
after completing training for his M.D., he elected to revert to the naturopathy
of his grandfather. To that end, he travelled the world learning about and
securing herbal constituents he used to create his complex remedies for
diseases that were generally regarded as terminal or untreatable.
Less than five years after he developed a therapy that seemed
a cure for AIDS, I met him. My interest in the threat AIDS posed was the
subject of our first conversation, almost an hour long. He had answers to every
question that had stymied allopathic researchers. Not long after that, I
visited his lab in his basement apartment in Washington, DC. Months later, I
met AIDS patients he had saved from certain death.
Often, he sent them medicinals he’d made via UPS. When some
of those parcels had inexplicably gone missing, I looked for help to find out
why. About that time, the detective came into my store.
By that time, both Dr. Buyck and I had good reason to be
suspicious. Although it might have seemed that he was paranoid when he told me
that he thought his phone had been tapped, I knew it wasn’t like him to make
such statements falsely. Indeed, as I met more of his patients and learned the
stories about the hopeless diagnoses they’d received from their allopathic
physicians before seeing Dr. Buyck, I grew to appreciate his genius and his
integrity; so many of them had been cured.
In fact, years later, I visited two of his most famous AIDS
patients when I went with Dr. Buyck to
their upscale apartment. Both men were prominent AIDS researchers at NIH. As he
had done for so many others, he’d crafted life-saving remedies for them.
That’s why I chose to try to find ways to make the world
aware of his work. To that end, I wrote Oliver Stone about making a movie about
Dr. Buyck. To my great surprise, his personal physician, Dr. Chris Renna,
phoned me six months later because Stone had told Renna to decide whether he
should make a film about Dr. Buyck. Sadly, Renna didn’t understand either the
scope or the nature of Buyck’s work. The movie never happened.
Other things did. During a visit to Dr. Buyck, he told me
the people who lived above him had moved out. Since Buyck was friends with the
apartment manager, he asked whether he could go upstairs to see whether they had
tapped his phone. I was to stay in Buyck’s apartment and call my store. I did.
Minutes after I hung up, Buyck returned to his apartment and
told me, almost verbatim, exactly what I had said to my salesman.
But that wasn’t the only time. Less than a year later, Buyck
asked me to drive him to an herb shop he’d helped a man open. After teaching
the man about raising and importing herbal medicinals, Buyck became one of the
man’s best customers. We were to drive there to pick up an order Buyck had
placed earlier that day.
The shop owner looked surprised when we arrived. “Your man
has already been here,” the owner told us. That order, important to a number of
Buyck’s patients, had had a value of thousands of dollars.
Knowing that wire-tapping had cost him (and his patients)
dearly, Buyck developed methods to prevent further losses. For a while, things
went well. Both he and I were pleased when a young man who professed to have a
genuine interest in volunteering to be his medical assistant did just that. For
a while, he was a huge help to Buyck. I got to know the young man after meeting
him half a dozen times.
However, when I was asked to speak at a ceremony honoring
Dr. Buyck, Buyck told me he was
suspicious. Days later, he confronted the young man with the proof of those
suspicions. Because the youngster had, by that time, seen the scope of
Buyck’s good work, most often done
without charge, he wept as he admitted he’d been working for a military
intelligence agency.
I wasn’t surprised about that. But I was surprised when I
received a call from the detective I’d hired. He’d found proof that government
agents had been impersonating UPS personnel; he saw what they’d done with
Buyck’s packages. Then, in a whispery voice, he told me he’d have to call me
later.
I never heard from him again. Strange as that was, his ad in
the Yellow Pages also disappeared; his phone number was disconnected. To this
day, I remain mystified; the man vanished.
That said, there is one thing I’m sure of. After having a
“completely cancerous” tumor removed from my colon, I was advised by my surgeon
at Duke to have a resection procedure. Buyck advised against it; he made
medicine for me that I took religiously.
I’ll never forget what my surgeon said following my
examination a few months after I completed Buyck’s medicine.
“Pristine,” he said, about the area of my colon on which
he’d operated.
Unfortunately, I was the only one who heard him say it.
B.Koplen
6/8/13
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