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Boyle was yelling. Rucco finally figured out that Boyle was trying to tell him they had won again. Both men had run very well that day, and Boyle was beside himself with excitement—later Buddha had had trouble getting him to leave the race because Boyle was so busy talking to and celebrating with everyone there. Rucco had been pleased for his friends, but he was a little sad that they weren’t coming on the golfing trip—they were both on such a high that it would have been great fun to have them along.
    At 8:00 A.M. that Tuesday morning the house was bustling. That was one of the best times of the day, the firemen thought, because it was an hour before the change of shifts, and most of the men tended to come in early, and so the house was full of people, exchanging gossip, some of it pure firehouse talk, some of it more social in origin. With the weather outside so strikingly clear and the temperature around seventy degrees, everyone was relaxed. That two planes had already taken off from Boston’s Logan Airport and were to be hijacked and aimed like missiles at the World Trade Center was something no one at 40/35 could yet know.
    Captain Frank Callahan, the senior officer in the house that morning, had been a fireman for just under twenty-eight years and a captain at 40/35 for three. He was an old-fashioned man, the other firemen thought, very much a throwback to another era when the officers did not lightly mix with the men. There was a certain emotional distance to him, and he did not encourage intimacy or pal-ship. He did not readily tell them that they had done a good job, and that too was a throwback to another age in America, one when life was harder and more austere, when compliments and kind words were more carefully rationed. In those years fathers did not lightly praise their children, and bosses did not easily praise their employees, in no small part because no one had praised them when they were growing up. It was a culture in which the absence of criticism was regarded as praise enough, and doing the job for the job’s sake was viewed as reward enough.
    Most people understood the need for some degree of distance between the officers and the men; Callahan’s friend Captain John Dunne, who had worked with him in Brooklyn at Ladder 105, thought such distance was a necessary part of the job, “because when you’re the captain, it’s like being the father of twenty-five terrific but incorrigible kids. You need the distance.” But there was no doubt that Frank Callahan preferred a little more distance than most other officers.
    On the first day when Callahan had shown up to take command of 35 Truck, in July 1998, no one in the house knew very much about him. Several of the men had hung around expressly to greet and welcome him. They intended, of course, to size him up as well. Callahan arrived, carrying his own gear. When he saw the men, he put it down and gave them a cool appraising look, neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was not the cold, hard stare that they would come to know all too well later on, when they had performed poorly at a fire, but rather a neutral glance, which on the first day implied, one of the men thought, that they were not to feel too good about themselves. Then without saying a single word—not even his name in introduction—Callahan turned and went upstairs to his office. That, naturally enough, had made the men nervous. It was a very clear signal that he was already measuring them.
    In the world of big-city firemen an enormous amount of information is constantly being passed through back channels; everyone, it seems, has worked with someone else at some other firehouse during rotations, or has a brother or a cousin or a father who has worked with a particular fireman, and so there is always someone who has the book on anyone new coming in. The men checked around, and someone knew Charlie Bonar, who had worked with Callahan when they were