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“Hello, Anne,” the woman in the jacket begins, in a voice that carries an accent from the old country.

Anne does not know if she should believe her own eyes. Can this be true? “Bep,” she whispers with joyful alarm. “Bep, is it really you?”

1961

The Empire State Building

Fifth Avenue and West Thirty-fourth Street

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN

The brochure calls it the Eighth Wonder of the World, and really it’s the only one that still carries clout, isn’t it? The Pyramids? The Colossus of Rhodes? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? All those corny ancient achievements, now nothing but dust or rubble. Only this most modern of cities can boast of the number-one tourist attraction of the twentieth century. It has 102 stories above the ground. It climbs 1,454 feet straight up into the air like an unchallenged dream. It is the Empire State Building, maybe the Greatest Wonder of Them All, at Thirty-fourth and Fifth.

Bep carries a plastic Brownie in her purse. Anne shoves back her hair with her plastic sunglasses and snaps a shot of Bep posing on the observation deck, smiling blankly, one hand resting on a coin-operated telescope. A lock of Bep’s hair, an escapee from her scarf, is worried by the crosscurrent of wind. Her eyes squint into the light. As a backdrop New York has provided what a million visitors have proclaimed to be the world’s most spectacular view. But Bep looks like an ashen shadow in the brightness of the day. In Amsterdam her face was as plump as a peach, but now it has gone sallow. Her eyes are nervous and shy of contact behind her cat-eye glasses. Anne hands back the camera after snapping the shot, and Bep turns away toward the vast scope of buildings and sky. At this altitude New York is an open jewel box. The broad sprawl of the city is awash with azure under the clouds. The view of West Thirty-fourth Street, a straight artery dividing Macy’s from Gimbels, runs to the Hudson River, and has soaked up the river’s watery blue. A gritty, diamond-encrusted cityscape runs east-west, north-south, buildings stacked like dragon’s teeth, tall and small, on the city’s grid. Cars stream like ants. People are reduced to specks. And off past the jutting piers, where the ocean liners nestle at their moorings, off to the west across the river, the landscape flattens and smears into a blue-pebbled map of crowded townships, and then the world beyond New York levels off and blurs into a band of slate-colored horizon.

Bep’s explanation of her life since she left the Prinsengracht in tears is thin.

She and her husband emigrated to the States in ’48. Children? Yes. Two boys. There is a picture in her wallet of all of them together, standing in front of their small brick suburban house outside Philadelphia. Is she still an office worker? Sometimes. Her husband owns a hardware store. She helps out with paperwork. But mainly she’s a housewife. Een huisvrouw, she says. Only now does Bep find Anne’s eyes directly. “Do you think about it often?” Bep asks her. “The days in Amsterdam?”

“Every day. I think about them every day,” Anne replies. She stares out at the horizon, allowing the wind to tease her hair across her face. Bep joins her in this long stare, and they share the silence high above the city’s hubbub. A mesh of wire fencing in a seriated fringe has been installed below the observation deck to discourage jumpers.

“Anne, I have something to tell you,” Bep says thickly. Her voice has now exposed the full urgency that she’s been trying to hide. “But I don’t know how to say it.” Anne feels a cold weight in her breast. “Do you . . .” Bep begins to ask her, “do you recall my younger sister, Nelli?”

A pause. “I remember her,” is all Anne says.

Bep expels a difficult breath. “It’s about her,” she explains, “this thing I have to tell you. It’s about her.” Bep’s eyes fall, tearless but stricken. “She was a collaborator.”

Anne feels her back stiffen. “Landverrader” is the word Bep has used in Dutch. A homeland traitor. A homegrown Quisling.

“There was a German soldier she fell for.” Bep’s fingers twist around the handle of her purse. “They were lovers throughout the occupation.”

Anne says nothing. Only waits.

“Somehow . . .” Bep informs her, “somehow she knew the truth. About the hiding place.” Bep shakes her head at a dead spot in the air. “I don’t know how she found out. I swear I never told her a thing, I swear it, Anne. But somehow she found out anyway. I knew because once we were having a terrible row over her . . . over her relationship with this German, and she shouted at me, ‘Why don’t you forget about me and just go back to your Jews?’”

Anne is now staring. Staring at the movement of Bep’s lips as she forms words.

“It was her, Anne,” Bep confesses. “It was Nelli who rang up the Gestapo and betrayed us all. It wasn’t one of the warehousemen, it wasn’t the charwoman. It wasn’t anybody but my sister.”

Anne says nothing. She can say nothing.