The Ice Lens — Paul West

Kije White, an American agent planted in the USSR of 1960 to snoop on Soviet airplane design, meets and has an intense affair with the wife of a commissar, a high official who eventually traps them and has her sent to the Gulag for twenty years, White for fifteen. After serving his sentence, White returns to the States and becomes a pool man, brushing and chlorinating, dividing his time between an aunt's Manhattan apartment and his treehouse in Central Park, to which there comes a wild female child, a teen he calls Bimini. Their uncanny relationship takes them into the lower depths of the city, where Kije scrapes an extra living by performing in sleazy clubs. When the commissar himself shows up in New York, Kije's career becomes even more frenzied as he seeks to cope with fast-unfolding events that force his past upon him yet again, but seems also to offer him a new lease on his faltering life.