After failing to find Ole Andreson at the diner, Max and Al finally leave. When describing the hitmen’s exit, the narrator uses a simile and an allusion:
The two of them went out the door. George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc-light and cross the street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team. George went back through the swinging-door into the kitchen and untied Nick and the cook.
The simile here—“In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team”—alludes to vaudeville, a type of comical theater performance that came to the United States from France in the late 19th century. Given vaudeville’s popularity at the time Hemingway was writing (the 1920s), Hemingway assumes his contemporaneous readers will easily be able to picture the classic male vaudeville performer’s costume, with its exaggeratedly “fancy” three-piece suits and top hats.
The fact that George only realizes Max and Al resemble vaudeville performers as they walk away from the diner highlights how, now that he is not in immediate danger, George can see reality much more clearly. In other words, he finally understands that these two men are much less threatening than they made themselves out to be.
After Al drags Sam and Nick into the diner's kitchen and ties them up as hostages, he takes charge of George and Max as well, instructing them on where to position themselves in the dining area so as to make the scene appear normal. The narrator captures George’s behavior in this moment using a simile, as seen in the following passage:
He had propped open the slit that dishes passed through into the kitchen with a catsup bottle. “Listen, bright boy,” he said from the kitchen to George. “Stand a little further along the bar. You move a little to the left, Max.” He was like a photographer arranging for a group picture.
In describing the mobster Max as being “like a photographer arranging for a group picture,” the narrator captures the bizarre energy in the restaurant in this moment. While Al and Max are ostensibly dangerous criminals holding the men hostage, their behavior does not come off as intimidating. Instead, Al has the energy of a nonthreatening photographer providing instructions and Max—like the men he is holding hostage—becomes another pawn for Al to move around.
This is one of the many moments in the story when reality defies the characters’ expectations. While George, Sam, and Nick likely had unnerving ideas of what it would be like to meet members of Chicago’s criminal class, the reality is much less scary than they expected.
