A SPY WALKS INTO THIS BAR: A Cold War Tale of Misdirection and Redemption

It’s 1990 and the Cold War is coming to an end, but the game of espionage continues on as America and the West prepares for the First Gulf War with Iraq. The career of longtime CIA officer, William Wythe, is also coming to a sad end at his final posting in Lisbon, Portugal. His last ten years have been spent mostly in an alcoholic blur since his wife died in a terrorist attack meant for him. The Chief of Station wants to be rid of him, a special counterintelligence section of the CIA suspects he may be a Russian mole and the high point of his dark weeks is anonymously playing piano at a local dive in the city two nights a week. But as is often the case in the “wilderness of mirrors” of espionage, all the facts and the people may not be as they seem. An unhappily married Brazilian woman is frequenting this jazz club and growing fonder of William, raising some hope that he may yet have a future worth living. She joins him on a private search for missing Hungarian royal jewels, which may have been hidden in Portugal towards the end of WWII. A modern neo-Nazi group is also on the hunt for those same jewels. All the players cross paths at the Clube de Jazz, which is run by an elderly Italian-American who’d been in America’s wartime O.S.S., the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.