He eased into the couch and waved at a couple he knew: regulars, like himself, season ticket holders for God only knows how many years. No, he responded quietly, his wife wasn't joining him tonight. Yes, it was indeed a shame: the opening night of the new season, and she wasn't there to experiene it. Yes, he promised to tell her all when he returned home. He glanced briefly at the program: Cosi Fan Tutti. His favourite Mozart. A new production, but one that he had heard was quite lovely, not that Euro-trash he had been forced to endure during their last trip to Italy. He sighed, just remembering it: an "iconoclastic direction," the local papers had said. Nonsense, he decided -- the purity of Butterfly's plight had been buried under a concept that even now made him cringe. Ah... for the old days, when opera was treated with respect. He had met his wife here, at the opera, when they were both young, students at New York University. He was studying music while she was more interested in anatomy. Still, like Romeo et Juliette, they had fallen in love and married... secretly, so her family would never know. Those first years were like a scene from La Boheme, he thought with a small smile. They had no money, but they had each other, and for a while, it seemed enough. She was his Giocanda, and even now the memory of those days stirred him, like a distant orchestra of close knit strings. Then, suddenly, it wasn't. Suddenly, she was Manon -- more interested in money and prestige. He suddenly felt like Orphée aux enfers, trapped in a marriage that had indeed gone terribly, terribly wrong. She was Medea, pushing him away; she was Salome, ever taunting him by casting her body at any man who happened to take her eye and ever returning to tell him all the lurid details to shame him into further submission. He in turn was Otello, mad with jealousy. He was the Dutchman, sailing the turbulent waters of his emotions in search of a love he knew no longer existed. Finally, he knew he was nothing more to her than a mere Capriccio, a passing fancy. Well, he would show his... his... Cunning Little Vixen. So he waited, patiently. Then one night, he found them together, she and her newest Giovanni, in his own bed . He shot them both -- not mortally. Oh no, his vengeance demanded more than the sudden finality of a bullet. Instead, he dragged their bodies to the basement, even as she screamed, pleading for mercy, a mercy he would never give her. Instead, he had a different finale for her and her... paramour. He shoved them into a storage room, then slammed the steel door shut. He turned on the record player he'd brought to the cellar just for the occasion, and the basement was filled with the strains of Verdi's Act Four of Aida: a fitting choice, he felt, although he wondered if they would appreciate the beauty of the selection. Then, with extreme patience and care, he sealed the doorway with an outer skin of brick and mortar. He still relished the sound of their desperate cries as they futily pounded on the unforgiving metal. Then, he'd showered and donned his tuxedo for the evening's performance. By the time he'd finished, the basement was silent. Ah well, he thought as he rose to enter the auditorium, it shouldnt have been all that surprising. After all, cosi fan tutti...