The original messages had been written in German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and to recover the plaintexts and translate them, Elizebeth worked closely with her lead coast guard linguist, thirty-two-year-old Vladimir Bezdek, a handsome Czechoslovak army veteran with black hair and high cheekbones. Born in Czechoslovakia, Bezdek had escaped to America when the war broke out by sneaking onto a ship. He spoke eight languages fluently: Czech, German, English, French, Polish, Latin, Italian, Russian. He read dictionaries in his free time, for fun, so of course he and Elizebeth got along,
