I was driving my cherry red Cinquecento around Rome the other day when one of the tires suddenly went flat.  Just like that. 

I had parked and gone into the American Express office to cash some travelers checks.  They insisted on seeing my driver's license.  The name, Alex Shaw, on the license matched the name on the checks.  The photograph looked vaguely like me.

When I came back out counting my thin stack of Euros, there was my tire flat as a slab of apricot leather.  Pssssssst.   Good thing it didn't happen two days earlier when I was driving the recklessly enticing curves of the Amalfi coast.

People are no different.  On a good day you're just zippity-doo-da-ing along, minding your own business, when some virulent virus gets its hands on your throat.  Or some cannibalistic cancer bites you in the ass.  And that's all she wrote. 

They strip you for spare parts (heart, eyes, liver, kidney, whatever); the rest is fertilizer.

I've been searching for Kafka's other suitcase for the last thirty-two years.  Now the doctors say I've got six months.  Six fucking months.

Thirty-two years ago on my birthday a Jewish prostitute from Berlin named Anna told me she'd slept with Kafka's lover.   It was a deathbed confession just before she croaked from tertiary tuberculosis. 

"You'll never guess, leibling, but I once slept with Dora Diamant."  She ran her fingers sadly down my face.

"Who?"

"Franz Kafka's last love interest.  She saved my life during the war."

"You're shitting me?"

Then she told me about the other suitcase.  Not the one filled with Kafka's old letters and diaries that Max Brod carried when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939.  But the other one, the one nobody else knew about.  The one Dora gave to Anna when Dora fled Germany for Soviet Russia just before the war.

Dora and Anna were lovers for several months in 1935, a circumstance that rescued Dora's life from a low point of hysteria, fretfulness and frigidity brought on by the Nazi tide.  The world was falling apart then, especially if you were a Jew.

Five years later Anna gave the briefcase and its startling contents to one of her customers, Waffen SS Gruppenfuhrer Grass.  In return he supplied her with fake identification papers denominating her as Gilda Lange, Aryan milkmaid and cabaret singer from Baden-Baden.

Two hours after Anna confessed to me her liaison with Dora Diamant, she haltingly signed an affidavit sworn under the pains and penalties of eternal damnation to the effect that Kafka's other suitcase, containing five unpublished stories of a highly pornographic nature, had saved her from deportation to Auschwitz.

Actually, the suitcase was more like a briefcase.  But even at the time I met Anna, while attending a rare book festival in Amsterdam, the contents of that suitcase or briefcase would have been worth a fortune to the right collector.  The Trial had been published to a crescendo of critical acclaim.  The Metamorphosis was world famous.  Their author was the quintessential existentialist. 

Anna had only read one of the stories but it was filthy. 

"Franz had a very dirty mind," she said, laughing bitterly.  "Dirtier than Henry Miller or John Cleland."  Though she couldn't remember the intimate details.

"But this is incredible," I said.  "A bookworm's wet dream.  You must have some clue as to where the manuscripts are now."

"Sorry sweetie," Anna said wistfully.  "But I haven't the slightest idea what became of Gruppenfuhrer Grass or the suitcase."

I helped her sit up to take a drink of water and with a little cough she died quietly in my arms.



Finding Kafka's lost porn stories became my obsession, the reason I got up in the mornings.

Being a dealer of rare books, I was privy to "official" discoveries of Kafka memorabilia.  Occasionally a letter from the great man came up for sale.  I bought a grocery list authenticated as having been written by K.  When I finally caught up with the lost manuscripts I would need a sample of his handwriting to confirm their genuineness.  Caveat emptor. 

I paid a news clipping service to scour the newsprint pages of the world for any reference to newly discovered stories by Kafka or a suitcase of Kafka materials.

In 1980 an entry appeared in the classified ads of a Tangier newspaper:

                Offered for private sale: certain documents belonging to K.
                Materials on view from May 1 to May 9.  Call in person at…

It gave an address in Tangier's upper Medina.

Arriving at the address two days later, I found the building boarded up and abandoned.  A notice of sale for unpaid taxes was nailed to the wall facing the street.

Six years later in Istanbul a thief tried to sell me several fake Kafka stories.  The handwriting was not even close to that of the grocery list.  I laughed in his face.  He then tried to rob me at gunpoint.  But I KO'd him with the brass base of the table lamp in my hotel room, where we were meeting, and threw him down the stairwell.

In the early 90's in deep midwinter a spam ad for a story of "forbidden love" by one F. Coughka appeared in my e-mail.  This led me to the door of room 13 of a crumbling fuck shack on the outskirts of Terre Haute.  When I knocked, a squat, toad-like man in a preacher's black suit and a fake beard ushered me inside.

As I entered the motel room, the last sound I remembered was the door locking behind me.   Two redneck evangelical ministers masquerading as homosexual dealers in erotic exotica and exotic erotica set upon and beat me senseless.  They left me for dead in an ice-covered ditch at the side of the road.  Which I would have been but for a passing good Samaritan.  I spent ten days in a hospital bed, and another two months recuperating in a rest home.  After that I always carried a stiletto.   

And after that, nothing.  The other suitcase and its contents had vanished into thin air.

Now in 2008 my name had suddenly appeared on Death's dance card.  Time was running out like fluid from a punctured car radiator.

*     *     *

The day after my doctor advised me of my impending doom, I sat in my usual café sipping my usual late morning glass of Chianti, while all this history rushed across my brain like a gale force wind through an abandoned house. 

The day's mail sat on the café table next to my Chianti.  I took a long drink that emptied the glass, motioned to the waiter for another and picked up the first letter.

It was from Arthur Zelig, purveyor of middlebrow pornography to the tourist trade from a back street shop in Taormina, Sicily.  He wrote that he was in possession of what appeared to be the title page of a story.  The typed title was: "The Fly".  Beneath it the author's name was written by hand: Franz Kafka.  Having heard that I was fixated on K. marginalia, he had written to me to offer it for sale.

As the sky over Taormina two days later turned a deep eggplant, I leaned forward from the hard edge of an Edwardian settee in Arthur Zelig's living room while he poured arak into two glasses.   When he added a splash of water the clear liquor turned milky, as though an over-anxious bullfrog had shot his wad.

Arthur, rigged out in a navy-blue caftan and leather Moroccan sandals, handed me one of the glasses.  His hair was closely cropped like that of an ex-marine, which he was.  He looked at me through a crow's sharp yellow eyes, as if I might be edible.

As we drank he passed me a sheet of rag paper, torn in one corner, dog-eared and brutalized by time, its surface spotted with grease, fingerprints and other filth.  "The Fly" it read, and beneath in an India ink scrawl: "by Franz Kafka".  As nonchalantly as a whore crossing a crowded barroom, I unfolded K.'s grocery list from my wallet and compared it to the hand-written portion of the title page.  The writing looked identical!

Hot damn! I thought.  After a lifetime of cul de sacs and dead ends, the trail had suddenly become red hot.  Anna's deathbed revelation had been true after all and the lost stories of Franz Kafka did exist.  Or at least one of them.

"Where did you get this?" I asked.