Chapter 15Commander Samia Alaoui, from the Paris Judiciary Police, entered the Balto. Tall and dark, she looked just like the other women of her time, but without the sartorial elegance: in the criminal police force, everyone wore the standard, trans-generational, unisex uniform, i.e. jeans, jacket and trainers.
Inside the bistro, she noticed, set above the bar, the framed photo of a crowd of men kneeling in prayer. The picture brought her back twenty years into the past, to when her father had come home from his pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam.
As a child of the 1960’s wave of North African immigration to France and the only girl among five brothers, Samia missed out on the Western freedoms which young girls dream of on the threshold of their lives. For her father,
