"I don't have time to ask you what 'lampoon' means," Bruce said. "But if the baby here wants to wave bye-bye to the Incredibly Deadly Viper, she'd better do it soon. It's already outside."
Sunny began to crawl toward the front door, but Klaus was not through talking to Bruce. "Our Uncle Monty was brilliant," he said firmly.
"He was a brilliant man," Violet agreed, "and we will always remember him as such."
"Brilliant!" Sunny shrieked, in mid-crawl, and her siblings smiled down at her, surprised she had uttered a word that everyone could understand.
Bruce lit his cigar and blew smoke into the air, then shrugged. "It's nice you feel that way, kid," he said. "Good luck wherever they put you." He looked at a shiny diamond watch on his wrist, and turned to talk to the men in overalls. "Let's get a move on. In five minutes we have to be back on that road that smells like ginger."
"It's horseradish" Violet corrected, but Bruce had already walked away. She and Klaus looked at each other, and then began following Sunny outside to wave good-bye to their reptile friends. But as they reached the door, Mr. Poe walked into the room and blocked them again.
"I see you're awake," he said. "Please go upstairs and go to sleep, then. We have to get up very early in the morning."
"We just want to say good-bye to the snakes," Klaus said, but Mr. Poe shook his head.
"You'll get in Bruce's way," he replied. "Plus, I would think you three would never want to see a snake again."
The Baudelaire orphans looked at one another and sighed. Everything in the world seemed wrong. It was wrong that Uncle Monty was dead. It was wrong that Count Olaf and the hook-handed man had escaped. It was wrong for Bruce to think of Monty as a person with a silly name, instead of a brilliant scientist. And it was wrong to assume that the children never wanted to see a snake again. The snakes, and indeed everything in the Reptile Room, were the last reminders the Baudelaires had of the few happy days they'd spent there at the house-the few happy days they'd had since their parents had perished. Even though they understood that Mr. Poe wouldn't let them live alone with the reptiles, it was all wrong never to see them again, without even saying good-bye.
Ignoring Mr. Poe's instructions, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny rushed out the front door where the men in overalls were loading the cages into a van with "Herpetological Society" written on the back. It was a full moon, and the moonlight reflected off the glass walls of the Reptile Room as though it were a large jewel with a bright, bright shine-brilliant, one might say. When Bruce had used the word "brilliant" about Uncle Monty, he meant "having a reputation for cleverness or intelligence." But when the children used the word-and when they thought of it now, staring at the Reptile Room glowing in the moonlight-it meant more than that. It meant that even in the bleak circumstances of their current situation, even throughout the series of unfortunate events that would happen to them for the rest of their lives, Uncle Monty and his kindness would shine in their memories. Uncle Monty was brilliant, and their time with him was brilliant. Bruce and his men from the Herpetological Society could dismantle Uncle Monty's collection, but nobody could ever dismantle the way the Baudelaires would think of him.
"Good-bye, good-bye!" the Baudelaire orphans called, as the Incredibly Deadly Viper was loaded into the truck. "Good-bye, good-bye!" they called, and even though the Viper was Sunny's special friend, Violet and Klaus found themselves crying along with their sister, and when the Incredibly Deadly Viper looked up to see them, they saw that it was crying too, tiny shiny tears falling from its green eyes. The Viper was brilliant, too, and as the children looked at one another, they saw their own tears and the way they shone.
"You're brilliant," Violet murmured to Klaus, "reading up on the Mamba du Mal."
"You're brilliant," Klaus murmured back, "getting the evidence out of Stephano's suitcase."
"Brilliant!" Sunny said again, and Violet and Klaus gave their baby sister a hug. Even the youngest Baudelaire was brilliant, for distracting the adults with the Incredibly Deadly Viper.
"Good-bye, good-bye!" the brilliant Baudelaires called, and waved to Uncle Monty's reptiles. They stood together in the moonlight, and kept waving, even when Bruce shut the doors of the van, even as the van drove past the snake-shaped hedges and down the driveway to Lousy Lane, and even when it turned a corner and disappeared into the dark.