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Authors: Sakyo Komatsu
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another, the sports car had managed to avoid going over the guard rail. Two or three eyewitnesses corroborated the trucker’s testimony.
This was an unusual accident because there were as yet very few turbo cars on the road. The scene was quite terrible. The rear part of the Fiat engine had been ripped open by the shock of plowing into the guard rail. The turbine blades that had flown out of it were stuck in the back of the trailer and in the asphalt like silver needles. However, the two passengers had been separated from the engine by a protective steel plate set behind it, and had thus managed to avoid being skewered. By the time the driver of the truck had run to the other car, its driver was already dead. To lower the likelihood of dying in an accident, flexible steering columns were installed in almost any high-performance automobile and were assisted by numerous driver-protection and shock-absorption features that activated at the slightest bending of the wheel. At first glance, the driver of the sports car had appeared to be uninjured, aside from his right ankle, which was stuck in the bent body of the car.
Even so, the man was unmistakably dead. His leaden face hung low, and there was no longer any pulse in his forward-thrust arms. The glamorous platinum blonde in the side seat appeared to have sustained far worse injuries. She had not been wearing her seatbelt, and her face was covered in blood from where her forehead had struck the windshield. Her clothing was torn here and there, exposing a terrible laceration, and her chest was visibly collapsed from where it had struck the guardrail. A ruptured lung was blowing out bubbles of blood.
Even so, the woman was alive. An ambulance raced to the scene, and when the emergency crew rescued the woman from the twisted, warped body of the car, she was dripping blood from her mouth, continuing to mutter all the while:
“Tonio … Tonio … oh, stop it … what’s wrong with you … ?”
There were two reasons why this accident drew so much attention and left such an unusually detailed record. The first reason was the identity of the man who died. A film and television heartthrob, Antonio Sevellini had been a world-class actor, known for his cosmopolitan, playboy lifestyle and taste for luxury. As if that weren’t enough, the woman in the car with him was a call girl who had once achieved international notoriety due to her role in a NATO spying incident. Because she had been in the midst of a passionate love affair with Tonio—and because Tonio was the lover of a Middle Eastern princess whom it was rumored he would soon marry—the scandal-loving public went into overdrive at the news of his death. A call girl implicated in a spy case, a Middle Eastern princess, an international movie star—theories of conspiracy and assassination involving these three abounded, although the police authorities investigating the accident apparently viewed it as nothing more than a bad turn of luck that had nothing to do with scenarios suggested by juicy gossip.
The second reason for all the attention was Alfa Romeo, the automaker that had built the car. Their Barca Volante was the world’s first practical two-hundred-kilo-class gas turbine sports car, and questions still lingered regarding its safety and handling. The automakers of Europe and America had all been developing concept cars for a new class of vehicles that could maintain a steady two hundred kilometers per hour. This was because they were looking ahead to the “Eurasian Highway”—a giant, two-hundred-meter-wide roadway begun on nearly a billion dollars’ credit and investments from almost every nation, to start in Paris and continue in a nearly straight line through Luxembourg, Berlin, Warsaw, and Minsk before finally terminating in Moscow. The trouble with building cars in that class had involved the endurance of the tire and axle areas and the output of the engine. In the case of the engine, a rotary design
This was an unusual accident because there were as yet very few turbo cars on the road. The scene was quite terrible. The rear part of the Fiat engine had been ripped open by the shock of plowing into the guard rail. The turbine blades that had flown out of it were stuck in the back of the trailer and in the asphalt like silver needles. However, the two passengers had been separated from the engine by a protective steel plate set behind it, and had thus managed to avoid being skewered. By the time the driver of the truck had run to the other car, its driver was already dead. To lower the likelihood of dying in an accident, flexible steering columns were installed in almost any high-performance automobile and were assisted by numerous driver-protection and shock-absorption features that activated at the slightest bending of the wheel. At first glance, the driver of the sports car had appeared to be uninjured, aside from his right ankle, which was stuck in the bent body of the car.
Even so, the man was unmistakably dead. His leaden face hung low, and there was no longer any pulse in his forward-thrust arms. The glamorous platinum blonde in the side seat appeared to have sustained far worse injuries. She had not been wearing her seatbelt, and her face was covered in blood from where her forehead had struck the windshield. Her clothing was torn here and there, exposing a terrible laceration, and her chest was visibly collapsed from where it had struck the guardrail. A ruptured lung was blowing out bubbles of blood.
Even so, the woman was alive. An ambulance raced to the scene, and when the emergency crew rescued the woman from the twisted, warped body of the car, she was dripping blood from her mouth, continuing to mutter all the while:
“Tonio … Tonio … oh, stop it … what’s wrong with you … ?”
There were two reasons why this accident drew so much attention and left such an unusually detailed record. The first reason was the identity of the man who died. A film and television heartthrob, Antonio Sevellini had been a world-class actor, known for his cosmopolitan, playboy lifestyle and taste for luxury. As if that weren’t enough, the woman in the car with him was a call girl who had once achieved international notoriety due to her role in a NATO spying incident. Because she had been in the midst of a passionate love affair with Tonio—and because Tonio was the lover of a Middle Eastern princess whom it was rumored he would soon marry—the scandal-loving public went into overdrive at the news of his death. A call girl implicated in a spy case, a Middle Eastern princess, an international movie star—theories of conspiracy and assassination involving these three abounded, although the police authorities investigating the accident apparently viewed it as nothing more than a bad turn of luck that had nothing to do with scenarios suggested by juicy gossip.
The second reason for all the attention was Alfa Romeo, the automaker that had built the car. Their Barca Volante was the world’s first practical two-hundred-kilo-class gas turbine sports car, and questions still lingered regarding its safety and handling. The automakers of Europe and America had all been developing concept cars for a new class of vehicles that could maintain a steady two hundred kilometers per hour. This was because they were looking ahead to the “Eurasian Highway”—a giant, two-hundred-meter-wide roadway begun on nearly a billion dollars’ credit and investments from almost every nation, to start in Paris and continue in a nearly straight line through Luxembourg, Berlin, Warsaw, and Minsk before finally terminating in Moscow. The trouble with building cars in that class had involved the endurance of the tire and axle areas and the output of the engine. In the case of the engine, a rotary design
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