“Nooooooooo!”

He and his guests watched in mesmerized silence as the huge droplets fell in slow motion, dispersing in the air, their momentum carrying them forward. But when they landed, it was in accelerated time.

The black deluge struck, splattering the grounds and everyone gathered there. Women screamed in disgust and dismay; men shouted and cried out in anger. Milos himself took a faceful. Gasping, sputtering, he wiped his eyes and cleared his nose.

The smell: engine oil. Bad enough, but not clean engine oil, this was thick, black, filthy stuff. And it was everywhere. The entire yard was coated with it; even the pool showed dark splotches floating on the surface.

And then the sound of the copter was no longer fading but growing louder again. Milos looked up and saw that it had circled around and was coming in for a second pass. To his right he noticed a couple of his men drawing their weapons.

“Shoot it!” he screamed. “Shoot it down!”

But then pandemonium took charge. The sight of guns and the fear of another oily drenching sent the guests into wild panicked flight in all directions. But the oil had rendered the wood of the decks treacherous: all about him people were slipping, falling, or being knocked down. Even his own men were losing their footing.

It looked like a replay of Friday night—tables upended, food and glassware flying, people diving, rolling, floundering and gasping after being knocked into the pool. Except this time Milos was not watching from the safety of the house; he was down in the heart of a chaos of splashing oil, flying food, smashing glass, and beautiful people in flight. And worse—he was utterly powerless to stop it.

As the rear door of the helicopter’s dangling pod dropped open above him, Milos spun and looked around for shelter. He noticed the blond actress crouching under a patio table. Good idea. He ducked and crowded in beside her.

“Get out of here!” she cried, pushing at him. “Get your own table!”

“This is my table!” Milos roared. “They’re all my tables!”

Venting only a fraction of the fury boiling within him, he grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved, sending her rolling away. She ended up sprawled on her back on the decking.

She bared her teeth and screamed. “You bas—” she began, but then she stopped and her eyes widened.

Milos was just turning his head to see what had caught her attention when the tabletop came crashing down on his head and back, flattening him to the deck.

Through his pain-blurred vision he saw a whale of a man in an oil-soaked tuxedo groan and roll off the tabletop onto the slippery deck. And through the roaring in his ears he heard the actress’s derisive laughter.

He lay prone, unable to move. It wasn’t the table pinning him to the deck; humiliation and the feeling of utter impotence weighed him down. Instead of a scream of rage, the sound that rose in his throat was more like a sob.