He spent the remainder of the afternoon in a building across the street, led there by Victor down a cellar bulkhead to a cool stonewalled room. There at a small table with a kerosene lamp the two men of the night before sat, one laying out slow hands of solitaire while the other read through a newspaper or racing form, he couldn’t tell which. They paid no attention to him at all and only spoke to one another from time to time briefly in Italian. Two walls were lined with wooden casks and from these he drew out wine to fill crates of empty bottles all of a uniform size but free of labels or other markings and then stoppered them from a box of corks and repacked them in the wooden crates until there were eight such crates loaded. It was dusk when again he went to the restaurant where he sat with the young daughter as she drew maps for him on butcher paper, labeling each street and then marking more carefully the alleys that ran up between them. He felt slow and stupid beside the bright sure intelligence of the child but paid careful attention at least until the end when she handed over the maps and told him, “Don’t worry—you can’t get lost unless you try and drive the horse. Just hold the lines loose and he knows where to go and where to stop. I’ve done it myself.”

The wagon had raised sloped shelves that rose to a peak in the middle and the shelves were lined with empty peck baskets. There was room behind the seat under the shelving for the cases of wine. The horse was an old bright bay with heavy feathered feet and strung between the hames was an old set of cowbells on a thong. The clappers of the bells were abraded to tender thin strikes of iron against the greened bronze and so did not ring out but rather chimed in the moist stilled air as if delight muted.

He held the lines loose as directed and the weary horse drew the wagon up through the alleys sprawled against the hillside over the town, the alleyways’ hardpacked dirt just wider than the wagon itself and edged with homemade fencings of wire or upright planks each of a different size and length and each set with a likewise gate and as they went along people, usually an older woman but several times men of different ages and thrice children, were waiting to step from the gate to the wagon with a peck basket or two filled with vegetables mostly but sometimes breadstuffs and always each a washed empty bottle identical to those in the crates. The baskets were not always full but regardless each was exchanged for a bottle of the wine and the people bore those away inside empty baskets. All of the people nodded and spoke briefly to Jamie and he nodded back but made no effort to speak. There was no exchange of money and no record-keeping for he drove the route as marked out and the baskets were loaded in order front to rear. Once he clearly saw a small tight square of folded money stuffed down the side of a basket filled otherwise with new lettuces and after seeing this he did not look, did not want to see any more. The system struck him as elaborate and beautifully simple.