Within the walls of Echo Terrace, the world... Farro Fescu is the concierge of Echo Terrace, an apartment block in New York City. Passing through his lobby at all hours of the night and day is an exotic cross-section of the world's population- An Egyptian born plastic surgeon who lives on the fifth floor and specialises in gender reassignment; a fighter pilot, on the eighth floor, who flew for Nazi Germany during WWII; an Iraqi spice merchant and the world-famous crazy-patch quilter with whom he's having an affair; and the young widow whose apartment is a jungle Eden filled with a menagerie of specimens - finches, canaries, a defanged cobra, and a monkey named Joe - that had been the subject of her dead husband's research. Fescu knows them all, knows all their secrets. He is keenly attuned to the building and the people in it, yet he does not know what is in his own heart - why, after a long, hard life, he is still alive, and still alone. Nor does he know of what he will be capable in the face of sudden, overwhelming tragedy...