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flashlight to Fanta, who trained it on the lid. Broadhead blew dust off the label.
     
    “Greed.” Three voices sang out in unison.
     
    “They’re numbered,” said Broadhead, sliding his finger through the air along the cans on the shelf. “Twenty-five through forty-two.”
     
    “That makes a complete print, with the two dozen upstairs,” Valentino said. “The full eight hours.”
     
    “Or ten. If it’s what it says it is. This one’s not empty, at least.” Broadhead rattled the can in his hand. Then he looked around. “Odd thing about this room. There’s no entrance except the hole we came through.”
     
    “Maybe there’s a secret panel.” Fanta prowled the walls with the beam. “Nope. Solid earth.”
     
    “Why wall up an empty liquor room?” Valentino asked.
     
    “Maybe we should ask him.”
     
    Fanta’s voice was tight. Both men turned at the sound of it. The flashlight was shining on a human skull.
     
    **
     
     
    CHAPTER
    4
     
     
    THE FLASHLIGHT BEAM moved, illuminating the rest of the skeleton, heaped into a crumple at the edge of the rubble that had spilled inside the room. In the shadows it had looked like part of the broken wall.
     
    In that moment, Valentino realized he’d never seen one “in person,” and was mildly surprised to learn that it didn’t look any different from those he’d seen in movies. The leering skull and hooplike ribs wore a fine coat of gray dust.
     
    Broadhead, ever the curious scholar, leaned down and poked at a spindly upper arm with the bowl of his pipe. The bone separated from the shoulder and fell to the floor with a hollow rattle, like film clattering around the reel on a projector.
     
    “Offhand, I’d say it’s been here as long as the wall,” he said.
     
    “Duh.”
     
    They stared at Fanta, who smiled nervously and slid her hair away from her face. “Sorry, Professor. Kyle. It couldn’t have gotten in here otherwise.”
     
    “I think we’ll go back to ‘Dr. Broadhead.’ Informality seems to have bred disrespect.”
     
    “She’s upset,” Valentino said.
     
    “Not really. I’ve seen worse on the Sci Fi Channel.”
     
    “Another argument in favor of the V-chip,” Broadhead said. “We’re raising a generation of emotional robots. Boo!” he shouted. Fanta and Valentino jumped. Broadhead blew through his pipe and put it away with an evil flourish. “Not so desensitized after all.”
     
    “Is this a joke to you?” asked Valentino.
     
    “No, and it hasn’t been for our friend here since before either of you was born. Me, too, possibly. Or anything else. Even tragedy has an expiration date.” He turned and gathered half a dozen film cans under his arms. “Give me a hand with these. Fanta, go upstairs and bring down as many cans as you can carry without dropping them. If we’re lucky, the material inside is brittle as hell.”
     
    She asked how that was lucky.
     
    “Fragile we can deal with, if the techs are as good as their training. If it’s dissolved into a mess of orange goo, we might as well put it on a salad. There’s a reason it’s called the Vinegar Syndrome.”
     
    Valentino stared. “We have to report this.”
     
    “Yes, and once we have, the building becomes a crime scene and everything in it becomes public property indefinitely. Would you care to see what several months in a humid L.A. evidence room can do that three quarters of a century in a relatively stable environment can’t? Von Stroheim will haunt you to your grave.”
     
    “What’s stable about it?”
     
    “The air down here is cool and dry, so I have hopes for this stuff. I won’t lay odds on what’s upstairs. Silver nitrate’s fickle. It’s been known to survive under conditions that would destroy so-called safety stock, and to go up like a firecracker when someone gets a hot idea. But if it is Greed, we don’t want some dim-witted desk sergeant mistaking it for porno and screening it at a police smoker.”
     
    Fanta said,