Page 25 of By Any Means

“You want company?” the voice said, quietly, more significantly.

Ah, the Bowery. “Piss—off!” Chary yelled.

At last this seemed to do something: whoever it was shuffled off.

Chary sighed. He couldn’t go home. But neither could he stay there, reclined against a filthy toilet in the rooming-house bathroom. He’d sleep first. Try again later.

He stood up. Dried his face with his shirt. Unlocked the door and peered out.

No interloper.

But when he rounded the hall corner to the narrow stair, there was a man he didn’t recognize leaning against the curving handrail. Not tall, not short. Legs crossed at ankles, long fingers clutching a flat cap and a newsprint. A bowed, fair head, which appeared to be minding its own business, attention far down the stairwell.

Chary tallied his presence as unproblematic and nonthreatening, and hurried past.

“You didn’t take it off.”

Chary’d already made it down ten steps; he caught himself and whirled.

“Sorry?” He craned his neck awkwardly. There were no electric lights there. The man had become a shadow. Had he been the one to bang on the door? Surely not.

“Sir? I beg your pardon?”

He was swiftly joined on the stair. The man stopped a mere step above him, close to the handrail—it brought him exactly to Chary’s height and let the faint glow from the stairwell’s nethers light his dark, deep-brown eyes like a glimmering sea-cave.

Laurie Moore met his stare, curious and steady. “Can’t say I like the beard.”

“You!” Chary gasped.

Laurie brought with him a New York incongruity of lemony crushed green, rotary-cut grass, earthy musk. Chary wouldn’t have thought him the type to wear scent, although he looked like he belonged in an advertisement for it, perfectly outlined in a black-and-white suit. He seemed tired, though. He drew a hand through his hair, pushing it up off his forehead; it fell back into its side-part and coif. “Good morning, Chary. Can we talk?”

Chary, speechless, marveled at how easily Laurie’s unremarkableness had just been… shrugged off him. How easily he’d donned it in the first place, even dressed as he was. And how handsome he was, even fatigued, handsomer than Chary remembered, which seemed like a feat—wasn’t memory supposedly flattering to reality?

“You were in there quite a while,” Laurie said. “Couldn’t you get it off today?”

Six inches. It was the height of the stair-riser that separated them, precisely how much taller Chary stood than the other man. They were on equal footing. And yet.

“Today? What do you mean? What are you doing here? Have you been following me?”

“I didn’t expect to find you slumming it in the Bowery, of all places. Not when I left you in Nowhere, Maine.”

“I’m not slumming⁠—”

“No.” Laurie smiled, not nicely. “You’re not.” He leaned in. “Labor spy,” he said softly. “Why are you working in your own factory, Chary Wright?”

He knows. How? He knows.

Chary about-faced and ran down the stair, his steps stuttering—his muscles were that stiff, and shock seemed to have turned them further vulcanized. It was like riding stilts.

He heard a muffled curse, Laurie’s pursuing steps, decidedly not stuttering, but Chary was already out the back door to the courtyard. There was a rare outlet to 1st Street behind the tenement on the corner; he wove through laundry and outhouses and clustered garbage cans with lids akimbo and found it, and turned his way northward on 2nd Avenue, skittering around three surface cars on their rails.

The arched gate to the marble cemetery was ajar. Unrepentantly, he ran across the green to the backside of the red-brick YMCA, where a tiny footpath opened up to the yard behind an old, cathedral-like bank.

On the greater Bowery, outside of the shadowy loom of the Third Avenue El, the sunlight’s sharp attention drew Chary up from his pell-mell run and into a strait-laced, hard-breathing walk with the crowd, fists at his sides. He had to have lost him⁠—

“Chary” was hissed behind him.

Lord. He was surprised—all right, not very surprised—that Laurie had been able to follow him, but ignored the beckon.