Linus Major IV, nervous as all get-out, waited for his job interview sitting on a wooden bench in a dreary hall by a museum vice president’s office door. The interview went exceedingly well, helped a great deal by young Linus’s long-held penchant for archaeology and dinosaurs.

Linus got the job.

Unfortunately, the position did not necessitate the use of Linus’s meager archaeological background. He was to be a maintenance man. No matter, Linus was thrilled. The mere fact that he was working, and working near dinosaurs, was just fine by him.

The imam’s prison time was up on Monday, February 11, 2005. He would be paroled two days shy of his forty-eighth birthday. On the morning Jamal was paroled, he took a train from Ossining, New York, to Manhattan. He arrived at Grand Central Station on Forty-second Street at noon. He walked out the Lexington Avenue side of the station and walked north until he saw Bloomingdale’s Department Store. The store’s flag was snapping in a cold, strong breeze. Next to it were the flags of the United States, Israel, Germany, Italy, and New York State. The imam wondered why the Israeli flag was flying up there with its big Jew star for everyone to see.

That bothered him.

Across from Bloomingdale’s, on the southwest corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, was a crummy redbrick building, squashed between two tall modern office towers. The old building’s door and ancient window frames needed sanding and paint. The dilapidated structure housed a branch of the state’s Probation Department. Rasheed Jamal pulled off one of his old work gloves with his teeth (he had been wearing the same pair when he was arrested) and took a crumpled piece of paper from his pants pocket. It had “140 East 59th Street” written on it. It was the address of the dilapidated building. The imam opened the building’s old door and walked in. He took the rickety stairs one flight up to the probation officer’s floor. There was only one door on the first landing. Printed on its dirty window was:

BRANCH OFFICE
STATE OF NEW YORK
CORRECTIONS DEPARTMENT
Lester Bodkin—Probation Officer

The imam pushed open the door and stepped into a small waiting room. The door to the main office was opened a crack. A voice from behind the door ordered the imam to “get the hell in here.”

Lester Bodkin’s office smelled like a dirty clothes hamper.

The imam’s PO was an obviously out-of-shape, bald, pudgy, prissy-looking man named Lester Bodkin, aka Bodkin the Turd. Bodkin was half the size of Rasheed Jamal, maybe less than half, and had a drinker’s red, puffy face. The probation officer’s protruding potbelly hung over his belt and strained the buttons of his shirt. This merciless little man wore rimless eyeglasses and a bow tie. Bodkin resembled a moon-faced Himmler. His three-day-old shirt was stained from some past meal. Bodkin had very short legs. He leaned on the front tips of his shoes when he sat up straight in his desk chair but wouldn’t lower the chair. That would force him to look up to most of his ex-cons.