Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies alike as Salvo, is the ever-innocent twenty-nine-year-old orphaned love child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese woman. Educated first at a mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome, Salvo is inspired by his mentor, Brother Michael, to train as a professional interpreter in the minority African languages of which, almost from birth, he has been an obsessive collector.