The door of Henry’s lunchroom opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.
‘What’s yours?’ George asked them.
‘I don’t know,’ one of the men said.
‘What do you want to eat, Al?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Al. ‘I don’t know what I want to eat.’
The Killers: Ernest Hemingway
Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Anderson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavyweight prizefighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick. (The Killers: Ernest Hemingway).
‘I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.’ (The Killers: Ernest Hemingway).
Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1927) is a prohibition-era short story that reflects the violent crime wave gripping the USA at the time, the emergence of the mob in all major cities, the recourse to assassination and murder to settle beefs, the impunity with which gangsters acted, the inability or unwillingness of the authorities to reign them in.
Two hitmen arrive at a diner in Summit, Illinois and brazenly explain to the owner, staff and customers that they’re waiting for Ole Anderson, the Swede, a former heavyweight boxer, who’ve they’re planning to kill and know habituates the restaurant at 6:00 pm every day.
As they wait for the Swede to arrive, the two hit men causally abuse, terrorise and mock their hostages, not hiding their murderous intent, nor expecting anyone to resist or prevent them from carrying out their heinous deed. Indeed, Sam, the African-American cook, repeatedly implores his fellow captives to forget about heroics, not to get involved or put themselves in the middle of a dispute that they nothing about and has nothing to do with them.
When the two hitmen realise that the Swede is not going to show up to the diner this evening, they boast that they know where his boarding house is and they’ll catch up with him – and kill him – later, at their leisure. They have no concern that their prey will elude them.
One of the customers, Nick Adams, takes the opportunity of the hitmen’s departure from the diner to rush to the Swede and tell him what’s transpired and warn him that his life is in danger. Adams is shocked by the Swede’s attitude. He seems to have been expecting the news that assassins have tracked him down, accepted the inevitability of his death and tells Adams that he doesn’t intend to leave town to escape them or seek the protection of the police.
If the two hitmen remind us of the callousness and boastfulness of Odysseus and Diomedes in Book X of The Iliad as they torture and kill the callow Trojan, Dolon, so the Swede reminds us of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo as he stoically accepts his imminent death and refuses to take any actions to avert it.
Adams returns to the diner and relates to his comrades his conversation with the Swede. All quietly accept and respect the Swede’s rationalisation of his situation and the story ends with the reader certain in the knowledge that the Swede will be killed at the hands of the two remorseless hitmen.
Hemingway’s The Killers has been filmed several times, most notably in 1947 by Robert Siodmak. His eponymous noir masterpiece stars Burt Lancaster as the Swede, who gets a back story, explaining why he is to be assassinated, with less emphasis placed on the hitmen, the killers the short story and the film are named after.
Similarly, Don Siegel’s 1964 film, The Killers – starring John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and, in his last film before embarking on a full-time political career, Ronald Reagan – imagines a back story for the man about to be killed, who becomes Johnny North and a racing driver.
In 1956, the legendary Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky made a student short film that faithfully visualises Hemingway’s story, stressing the action that takes place in the diner (a bar in Tarkovsky’s film) and the fear and brutality embodied by the soulless assassins, which we’re entitled to believe refers to the nature of the Soviet Union, its casual violence carried out with impunity, as if murder were a banal, bureaucratic task, carried out by unremarkable men, stalwarts of an unbending, inhumane system.