The Wait (short story)

In a riff on Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers”, an Argentine mobster has fled Uruguay to Buenos Aires after an unknown fiasco, implied, via allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy and its version of the story of Ugolino della Gherardesca, to be a treasonous coup against a fellow mobster, a man named Alejandro Villari. Taking Villari’s name, the mobster spends his days in a paranoid and purgatorial state in a small urban apartment. He avoids going in public save an occasional trip to the movie theatre, and mostly sits drinking his coffee and mate, reading Dante, befriending an elderly dog, and letting the days drift by. At night he dreams exclusively about the hitmen, Villari and another nameless man, who are coming to kill him. When they eventually do arrive one early morning while he is in bed, he gestures to them to wait, and turns back over as if falling back asleep, either to arouse their pity or convince himself it was merely another dream.